Dick Pels
Dick Pels is Professor of Sociology in the Department of Human Sciences at Brunel University, West London, and a Senior Research Affiliate of the Amsterdam School of Social Science Research.
He is the author of Property and Power in Social Theory. A Study in Intellectual Rivalry (Routledge, 1998), The Intellectual as Stranger. Studies in Spokespersonship (Routledge, 2000) and Unhastening Science. Autonomy and Reflexivity in the Social Theory of Knowledge (forthcoming Liverpool University Press, 2002). He has edited books on Bourdieu, basic income, and political style, and has widely published in international journals on social and political theory, the sociology of knowledge and intellectuals, and intellectual history.
His current research interests are in theories of performativity and performance, the social status of 'things', intellectuals and media, and the role of celebrity culture.
Acting As If: On Playing for Real in the Social World
Friday, 09.00
Drawing inspiration from the work of e.g. Goffman, Turner, Schechner and Schieffelin, this paper proposes to take the venerable theatrical, dramaturgical, or performance metaphor for social action ('all the world's a stage', 'role-playing', 'acting out a script', the social as 'game' etc.) more literally and radically, with the purpose of articulating it into an explicitly normative theory of actorial freedom. Playing realities and 'acting as if' ('playing university', 'acting like a man/woman', 'doing' an ethnic identity) may stand as the valued opposite of forms of reification which work to abolish all role distanciation, in order to enforce a close identification between spokespersons and their social facts, functions, identities, or institutions. 'Acting as if' accentuates, activates, and enlarges the ever-present gap between individual role-players and their social 'things', appropriately 'estranging' them from their institutions and hence allowing them to be taken somewhat less seriously.