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The Cost of Leaving: A Cultural Sociology of Exiled Syrian Intellectuals


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Thesis

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Abstract

This dissertation examines exiled Syrian intellectuals’ interaction with the 2011 revolutionary movement and the social phenomena they have been forming during that process. Following a two-tiered research question, it investigates how exiled Syrian intellectuals contributed to the construction of meaning surrounding socio-political transformation and the cultural trauma unfolding around it, and what sociological dynamics have impacted this meaning-making process. Methodologically, it triangulates data from document analysis, semi-structured interviews with 30 Syrian writers and artists living in Paris and Berlin, and participant observation. Theoretically, it presents a novel framework for a critical decolonial cultural sociology, aiming to open a new research front in the enterprise of decolonising trauma studies by deepening our understanding of the role of intellectuals in cultural trauma construction and its predicaments in peripheral and diasporic contexts. The dissertation is organised into three empirical chapters. The first chapter examines internal social dynamics within the field of exiled intellectuals in Paris and Berlin. It suggests that intellectual self-positioning was influenced by material and symbolic factors, notably competition over symbolic status built around field-specific power structures such as an individual’s sacrifices for the movement. But it was also influenced by politically rooted psychological traumas. This is something that the sociology of intellectuals and intellectual positioning theory, in particular, has not paid attention to, and it is likely to be specific to the context of war and revolution. The chapter observes how the diversity of drivers (material, symbolic and psychological) for intellectual positioning contributed to the formation of a fragmented field constituting mutually antagonistic intellectual collectives organised around two lines of tension: structuralist materialist and culturalist. Further divisions were found around stances vis-à-vis armament, transitional justice and political Islam. The second chapter explores how exiled Syrian intellectuals relate to their host countries. It shows that while the Syrian cause remained at the centre of exiled intellectuals’ interventions, it was now viewed through a more universalist-cum-Eurocentric lens. This cosmopolitan outlook made state-led integration policies and exaggerated suppositions about cultural divergence seem ‘Orientalist’, ‘inflammatory’ and ‘ethnonationalism. But while they presented a universalising trauma narrative that connected the Syrian tragedy with other world events or discourses, they often reflected a sense of exceptionalism vis-à-vis the tragic nature of their trauma, particularly concerning its political outcome. This sense of exceptionalism and the perceived responsibility of the international community in it fostered multi-layered, often conflicted, attitudes and views toward host societies where inner tensions between referentiality and condemnation were loosely negotiated. A potential paradigm shift is observable in the work of diasporic intellectuals. Heretofore characterised by a focus on how the global periphery, and its intellectuals, are inhabited by a postcolonial hermeneutics which focuses on the Western ‘Other’, it is now characterised by a change in the direction of focus from a politics of being perceived (how the West sees the Third World or influences its self-perception) to a politics of perceiving (how the Third World and its intellectuals see and make ethical judgements about the West). The third chapter looks at how Syrian intellectuals in exile position themselves in relation to their home society. It suggests that after the 2011 revolution, particularly after its violent turn and the first wave of exile, the enlightening role of the Syrian intellectual was seriously questioned, and an idea/fantasy of radical embeddedness within society began to emerge within the exilic intellectual milieu. Intellectuals’ stance towards their home publics became increasingly marked by a combined sense of inferiority, indebtedness, and dependency. Additionally, the increasingly important and urgent role of trauma narration called for identification with the suffering masses. As a result, there was a tendency to give up any enlightening role and identify with ‘the people’ or align with what they perceived to be their general inclinations. Such alignment/identification sometimes included anti-intellectual sentiments, resulting in a self-contempt that may be understood as an extreme form of epistemic egalitarianism. The dissertation shows that by diverting their attention to trauma narration upon exile, intellectuals’ identification with the suffering masses became so complete that it diluted their shared identity. Thus, the intellectual’s assimilation within the masses, or what I refer to as a radically embedded position, obscured the political responsibilities that intellectuals were once thought to bear. In the case of Syria, this resulted in a weakened discursive influence and abstinence from institutional politics. In its extreme form, where intellectuals not only felt that they were equal but that they were inferior to ‘the people’, embeddedness was a hindrance to praxis. Not only did intellectuals resign any leadership responsibilities based on this positioning, but they became followers of public sentiment, offering uncritical solidarity towards what they perceived to be the people’s will. Paired with a politically turbulent context in grave need of clear, timely, critical and performatively potent intellectual interventions, radical embeddedness may be seen as a hindrance to the movement in that it politically neutralised an important discursive current, the secular democratic, all too soon and left the opposition even more susceptible to competing discursive currents supported by geopolitically motivated forces. Theoretically, the dissertation sets out the basic principles of a new decolonial cultural sociology. Initially, this is centred around the notion of theorising cultural trauma from the global periphery in ways that inform, supplement and re-examine ‘hegemonic trauma theory’ and its claims to universality. Similarly approaching other frameworks within cultural sociology from this vantage point, the new paradigm can be described as decolonial. It is also critical in that it deviates from standard methods in cultural sociology towards a theoretically contrapuntal framework. If cultural sociology aims to construct thick descriptions of structures of meaning, i.e. ‘structural hermeneutics’ that explain social phenomena, it follows that a critique of the emerging meanings is pointless since the purpose of thick descriptions (e.g. interview data) is not to describe objective truths about reality but to depict specific reconstructions of reality (e.g. how interviewees experience, feel about and act towards that reality). However, this new approach examines such data critically. It may sometimes point out inconsistencies or misconstructions in interviewees’ recollection or reconstruction of reality. By highlighting and analysing such inconsistencies or misconstructions, it seeks sociological explanations or inferences about the field under examination, its power dynamics and its actors’ motivations, emotions and self-narratives. From a cultural, sociological perspective, this seems pointless. After all, structural hermeneutics is about what meanings and structures of meaning are operating within a field, not the extent to which these meanings are valid or ‘truthful’. However, in pointing to such inconsistencies, one permits inquiries into the motivations and power dynamics that might nudge actors towards them. In other words, while methodologically speaking, interviewees’ statements are used as evidence of their experiences, representations and actions, not as evidence of the truth about what is happening, their statements are also critiqued scrutinised in the sense of making claims for potential discrepancies between what is said and what the researcher believes to be an empirical and demonstrable truth. Such interjections can be construed as a methodological device aiming to unearth sociological phenomena signalled by the discrepancies.

Description

Date

2021-06-21

Advisors

Baert, Patrick

Keywords

Cultural trauma, Intellectual positioning theory, Syrian Uprising, Forced displacement, Postcolonial intellectuals, Exiled intellectuals

Qualification

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Awarding Institution

University of Cambridge