The Intellectual as Stranger explores the historical association between images of the intellectual and those of the stranger, or the outsider to society. Using detailed case-studies, Pels examines the ambiguous strangerhood of political intellectuals such as Marx, Durkheim, Sorel, Freyer and Hendrik de Man.

In their substantive introduction, the editors first revisit two classical sites of controversy which have offered frameworks for theorizing the interplay between materiality and sociality: reification and fetishism. Obviously, these critical vocabularies emerge as crucial sites of perplexity as soon as the ontological boundary between subjects and objects is rendered equally problematic and fluid as the epistemological boundary between the imaginary and the real. A thumbnail sketch of the history of the two discursive traditions provides an elaborate systematic framework for (...) introducing the individual articles. The first axis of debate is generated by conceptual residues of the traditional tug-of-war between idealism and materialism which continues to infiltrate recent redescriptions of the web of sociality/materiality. The concern here is how much autonomy and agency can be granted to material objects in view of their social inscription and symbolic construction, and how far conceptual experiments with the ontological symmetry between humans and nonhumans may take us and/or should be permitted to go. The second axis of debate concerns the fate of critical theory and of ethico-political sensibility in the face of heightened uncertainties about the distinction between what is real, what is constructed, and what is imaginary, and between what may count as a person and what as a thing. (shrink)

Reflexivity, or the systematic attempt to include the spokesperson in accounts of the social world, is a magnetic signature and inherent riddle of all modern thinking about knowledge and science. Turning the narrative back upon the narrator may sharpen our critical wits about the `inescapable perspectivity' of human knowledge; but self-referential accounts may also trigger endless loops of meta-theorizing and lose track of the object itself. Negotiating the twin pitfalls of spiralling meta-reflexivity and flat naturalistic accounts, I argue for a (...) reflexive `one step up', which adds one storey to the story. It explores, through critical discussions of the work of Harding and Bourdieu, how reflexivity may promiscuously combine with conflicting objectivist and constructivist epistemologies, and how reflexive accounts invariably appear to run in a circle. This performative circularity, it is argued, does not invalidate the reflexive effort but defines its major strength. Constitutive circularity graces both world-accounts and self-accounts with a radical uncertainty and incompleteness; which implies, among other things, that we must shift part of the burden of reflexive work to our friends, or rather: to our best enemies. (shrink)

_The Intellectual as Stranger_ explores the historical association between images of the intellectual and those of the stranger, or the outsider to society. Using detailed case-studies, Pels examines the ambiguous strangerhood of political intellectuals such as Marx, Durkheim, Sorel, Freyer and Hendrik de Man.

In previous decades, a regrettable divorce has arisen between two currents of theorizing and research about knowledge and science: the Mannheimian and Wittgensteinian traditions. The radical impulse of the new social studies of science in the early 1970s was initiated not by followers of Mannheim, but by Wittgensteinians such as Kuhn, Bloor, and Collins. This paper inquires whether this Wittgensteinian program is not presently running into difficulties that might be resolved to some extent by reverting to a more traditional and (...) broader agenda of research. A social theory of knowledge (or social epistemology) along Mannheimian lines would not only reinstate the "magic triangle" of epistemology, sociology, and ethics, and hence revive the vexed problem of "ideology critique," but would also need to reincorporate the social analysis of science into a broader macrosocial theory about the "knowledge society.". (shrink)

This article explores some aspects of the long-standing metaphoric conjunction between the images of the intellectual and that of the stranger in the history of social thought . Recently, this conjunction has re-emerged in the self-complimentary image of the `exilic' or `nomadic' intellectual, who is torn between identities and transgresses cultural and linguistic traditions . The article offers a critical appraisal of the intellectualist presumption lurking behind such self-identifications, and raises the issue of intellectual spokespersonship in the novel conditions of (...) a postmodern `society of strangers'. (shrink)

What is so special about science? Taking up the old epistemological challenge, this article seeks to rephrase the question of scientific autonomy beyond conventional essentialist criteria of demarcation between science and society. The specificity of science is primarily sought in its studied `lack of haste', its socially sanctioned withdrawal from the swift pace of everyday life and from `faster' cultures such a politics and business. This `unhastened' quality defines science's peculiar delaying tactics, which systematically slow down and objectify ordinary conversations, (...) actions, and conflicts, attracting `slow' personalities who read and write more and talk less than the `fast cats' who are attracted to more decisionist, stress-driven and hasty cultures. Such a description, rather than claiming performative innocence, simultaneously expresses the ambition to strengthen what it characterizes, i.e. to liberate science from the stress and haste which are increasingly imposed upon it by the `external' pressures and performance criteria of enterprise culture and political correctness, and by the growing impact of media publicity and the academic celebrity system. In this fashion, the article simultaneously advances a new factual description of the specificity of scientific practice and a new normative/political project to enhance scientific and intellectual autonomy. (shrink)

This paper argues that the Marxist theory of the proletariat in many ways projects a romanticized self-description or 'false shadow' of its revolutionary spokesmen, and hence more proximately describes the missionary complex and Bohemian life-style of marginalized political intellectuals than a 'really existing' working class. This 'mistaken iden tity play' between spokespersons and their favourite sociological con stituency, which is already alluded to in various historical left-wing and right-wing 'farewells to the proletariat', is more systematically criti cized in recent reassessments (...) by, for example, Bahro, Gouldner, Gorz, or Bauman. Next to its psychological and sociological infrastructure, classical proletarian standpoint theory has also attracted critical atten tion because of its suggestive epistemological linkage between the con dition of estrangement and claims for scientific objectivity. This connection is reasserted by recent feminist and postcolonial standpoint epistemologies - which, however, also tend to repeat the logic of classi cal Marxism's metonymic 'identity play'. The paper concludes with a defence\of the idea of 'situated knowledges', which wishes to preserve the classical liaison between objectivity, distanciation and marginality, while simultaneously rendering it more reflexive in critical confron tation with the ubiquitous 'spokesperson problem'. (shrink)

This article explores some aspects of the long-standing metaphoric conjunction between the images of the intellectual and that of the stranger in the history of social thought. Recently, this conjunction has re-emerged in the self-complimentary image of the `exilic' or `nomadic' intellectual, who is torn between identities and transgresses cultural and linguistic traditions. The article offers a critical appraisal of the intellectualist presumption lurking behind such self-identifications, and raises the issue of intellectual spokespersonship in the novel conditions of a postmodern (...) `society of strangers'. (shrink)

This article takes up the challenge posed by ANT's principle of radical symmetry in a different way, by developing a counterargument to the Latourian presumption that social and symbolic constructions are in themselves too fragile and weak to effectively knit together the social order which needs ballasting by a myriad of technological objects. It is argued that social orders are also maintained by self-fulfilling prophecies which are stabilized by the reality effect of what is called `everyday essentialism'. Social facts are (...) routinely enacted by circular bootstrapping operations which are often misrecognized as such in order to produce an illusion of ontological transcendence. It is this practical everyday reification of social facts which also creates fixities, nodes, and sites for the symbolic `packaging' of material objects. Over against ANT's agnostic appreciation of this reifying practice as `something we all do', Pels, like Vandenberghe, therefore retains an interest in a critical theory of reification. This critique signals the normative significance of `acting-as-if' over against all forms of ontological essentialism: if social situations are more clearly defined `as if' they are real, we are less likely to be caught out by the stark reality of their consequences. (shrink)