Foreword

Abstract

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.

Citation

Hazelrigg, L. (2011), "Foreword", Dahms, H.F. (Ed.) The Vitality Of Critical Theory (Current Perspectives in Social Theory, Vol. 28), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. vii-ix. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0278-1204(2011)0000028003