Search results

The burden social theorists must be willing to accept, respond to, and act upon pertains to the difficulties that predictably accompany all efforts to convey to nontheorists the unwelcome fact of heteronomy – that as actors, we are not as autonomous as we were told and prefer to assume – and to spell out what heteronomy in the form in which it has been shaping the developmental trajectory of modern societies means for professional theorists. I introduce the concept of “vitacide,” designed to capture that termination of life is a potential vanishing point of the heteronomous processes that have been shaping modern societies continuing to accelerate and intensify in ways that prefigure our future, but not on our human or social terms. Heteronomy pointing toward vitacide should compel us as social theorists to consider critically both the constructive and destructive trajectory that social change appears to have been following for more than two centuries, irrespective of whether the resulting prospect is to our liking or not. In this context, the classical critical theorists of the early Frankfurt School, especially Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, pursued what turned out to be an evolving interest in rackets, the authoritarian personality, and the administered society – concepts that served as foils for delineating the kind of theoretical stance that is becoming more and more important as we are moving into an increasingly uncertain future.

To examine whether indigenous critiques of globalization and critical theories of modernity are compatible, and how they can complement each other so as to engender more realistic theories of modern society as inherently constructive and destructive, along with practical strategies to strengthen modernity as a culturally transformative project, as opposed to the formal modernization processes that rely on and reinforce modern societies as structures of social inequality.

Comparison and assessment of the foundations, orientations, and implications of indigenous critiques of globalization and the Frankfurt School’s critical theory of modern society, for furthering our understanding of challenges facing human civilization in the twenty-first century, and for opportunities to promote social justice.

Modern societies maintain order by compelling individuals to subscribe to propositions about their own and their society’s purportedly “superior” nature, especially when compared to indigenous cultures, to override observations about the de facto logic of modern societies that are in conflict with their purported logic.

Social theorists need to make consistent efforts to critically reflect on how their own society, in terms of socio-historical circumstances as well as various types of implied biases, translates into research agendas and propositions that are highly problematic when applied to those who belong to or come from different socio-historical contexts.

An effort to engender a process of reciprocal engagement between one of the early traditions of critiquing modern societies and a more recent development originating in populations and parts of the world that historically have been the subject of both constructive and destructive modernization processes.

For a scholar so young to have such a large coherent collection of papers that merit republication as a set – a first volume of The Collected Papers of … – is hardly ordinary. But Harry Dahms is hardly ordinary. Perhaps part of this latter fact can be attributed to “externalities” – for instance, that he is of two societies and two cultures, Germany and the United States; that he is also, if not so literally, of two eras, the present era and another much older, in developmental if not calendar time; that his own discipline reaches across departments of the university to incorporate topics of the historian, the philosopher, the sociologist, the political scientist, the institutional economist, the film critic, and more. No doubt real, those external factors have considerable impact as context and condition in the formation of the scholar's interests. The external comes to fruition in and as a person in various ways, however, and for Professor Dahms the hallmark of that personal process has been and continues to be a passion to discern that which has escaped attention, that which is concealed by the usual processes of conscious attention, perception, and evaluation. This is the passion of wonder – that sudden apprehension of the extraordinary in the ordinary, the ineffable in the confidence of an experience, the question in the comfort of an answer, the ludic in the sobriety of commonplace, the wound beneath the scab. It is wonder that puts in such peculiar relief the routines on which it depends for backdrop, even as routines (perhaps especially those of formal education) can stifle capacities for wonder. Dahms has somehow evaded that cost far better than most others I have known: while evidently a creature of higher education in the formal institutional sense, he parses in turn both wonderments and routinizations to which too many of us are insensitive. These capacities and actions are manifest in his writings, though one must listen carefully across carefully composed, often long, lines of syntax in which word selections leave traces of his agreement with Mark Twain and Ludwig Wittgenstein about choosing the correct word. Better yet, listen to his oral commentaries during a screening of a film by, say, Andrei Tarkovsky, or a pop-culture movie such as The Matrix.