Session 3: Intellectuals and Ideas

Session 3: Intellectuals and Ideas
Chair: Carool Kersten

Historical Discourse: The Dis/continuity of a Detour of Meanings
Jennifer Luo
Philosophy Department, Duquesne University, USA

In the wake of postmodernism, the possibility of an objective representation of the past by historians has become highly questionable. This has had serious implications in that it endangers the value and justification of the historian’s role in terms of helping to create a people’s identity through a representation of the past. History, however, is not about only a desire to fulfill a particular national or ethnic identity; rather, it has a broader ethical duty as an attempt to come to a holistic self-understanding of the human being that is already intimately related with what constitutes community.
But the value of postmodernism is that it problematizes and unsettles traditional historiography, forcing it to question its presuppositions and methodology concerning a retrievable past. As such, postmodern theory can help to strengthen historiography.
My goal is to re-conceptualize historical knowledge as an historical understanding within the space of philosophy. In this manner, the past can be argued to be not an object to be mastered and interrogated, but a Thou to be engaged with in a dialogical understanding, allowing it to speak to us through traces. History, then, becomes a task situated and mediated between hermeneutics and deconstruction. The point is to situate one against the other in order to exemplify the tensions that help to sustain a possible space of impossibility – the possibility of a discourse, of an agreement to come. It is in this permanent futuristic event of agreement that this possibility will be waiting for us.
Historiography has not fallen into an irretrievable abyss then as a result of postmodern thought, for it can still be justified in light of its critiques. Here is the break, the interruption, the disagreements that truly do present a dis/continuity of a detour of meanings.

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“Last Intellectual” or Institutionalized Simulacrum? Contemporary International Reception of Walter Benjamin
Yuliya Salauyova
Humanities Department, Jacobs University, Bremen, Germany

Walter Benjamin, the modernist thinker of the beginning of the XX century, has been granted the status of “the last intellectual” and has been receiving the unprecedented amount of attention from the variety of disciplines and scholarly approaches from the 1970s onwards. It is possible to state that the contemporary international reception of Benjamin’s work has now taken a life on its own through extensive construction, and at the same time appropriation, of multiple “Benjamins”: a religious philosopher, the first postmodern critic, a Marxist, an art theorist, a Jewish thinker, a cultural theorist, even a “lost sociologist” to name but a few. However, can this ability of the modernist intellectual to escape categorization (or offer easy ways for appropriation?) be conceptualized only in terms of peculiarities of Benjamin’s writings or as a symptomatic academic failure to find a “common” interpretative strategy? Instead of arguing for another “proper” way of reading Benjamin’s work, this paper focuses on the main discursive strategies developed by the reception that Walter Benjamin’s work received throughout 1990s and 2000s. The goal of the paper is to explore the construction of the “enigma called Benjamin” (or shall we say “simulacrum”?) through interpretative strategies and institutionalized practices of postmodern academic knowledge production. The timeframe of the paper was chosen due to the fact that the 1990s scholarship on Benjamin offers the most varied strategies to approach Benjamin’s work, as well as demonstrates the process of its commodification and institutionalization. The paper analyzes Walter Benjamin as a symptomatic postmodern product, the aspect that has not been properly explored yet.  Such analysis situates the paper within the broader questions of intellectual fashion, the limits of interpretative freedom offered by postmodern humanities, and academic strategies of intellectual commodification.

A Moment of Reflection about the Construction of Knowledge in a Post-modern Research Set-up
Caroline Newton
Research Group Urban Planning, Faculty of Applied Engineering Sciences, University College Ghent, Ghent, Belgium

Within the social sciences there has always been a tendency to divide ideas, concepts and thinkers in a binary manner. As such positivism is placed against symbolic interactionism, naturalism against anti-naturalism and so on.
The positivistic approaches study the world as if it is confined within general laws, although this might be useful for analysis, it is not representing the complexities of the real world.
Since Malinowski’s study of Trobriand society, ethnographic studies have become more differentiated and methods for data gathering, other than participant observation, have ‘emerged’. Methodologies are borrowed from phenomenology to feminism and postmodernism. The reflections made in postmodern and critical ethnography are relevant for the study of power structures and their impact on every day life. The grand social theories are as much a social construct as the narratives of everyday live, as such, post-modern ethnography tries to come to and end with the divide between macro and micro.
In this paper I will discuss the impact of Foucauldian and Bourdieuan thinking for the production of knowledge in my own research. Using my own work in several deprived neighbourhoods in Cape Town I will illustrate how studying the every day life of people, their opportunities and constraints, can help to understand the underlying power structures of a given society, and more importantly, how the structure-agency dichotomy in the social sciences can be overcome. Moreover we can stress that knowledge is thus not being produced only by the ‘intellectual’, but also by ‘common people’.

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