All entries for Wednesday 23 May 2012

Prof. Ien Ang's talk: Navigating Complexity

After having two glasses of wine, I feel like sharing some thoughts on today's event, Prof. Ien Ang's talk about the idea of "cultural intelligence", organised by the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies. Since I've found some of her writings inspiring, I was eager to listen to what she had to say.

Her talk started with quoting Zaki Laidi who says that "the complexification of the real creates the need for a simplification of its enunciation". The gist of her talk was about we, humanities and social science scholars, can simplify the complexity of the real world without simplistically ignoring the complexity. As the world has become more complex, scholarship inevitably attempts to dig deep into the complexity of the world. In so doing, she argues, we often end up with pursuing complexity for complexity's sake. I bet this reminds you of many writings which conclude by emphasising the complexity of the objects of research or of analysis itself (puzzling us at worst or providing a vague and broad lesson at best that the world is complex!). Thus, in order to go beyond critiquing simplistic solutions which fall short of solving complex problems, she suggests, we should recognise the need for simplification while actively responding to the complexity of the world. And she kept on saying that as "highly selective and contextualised, contingent knowledge", "cultural intelligence" makes simplifications in order to "act in complex and precarious contexts". So after all, putting it simply, it's all about "engagement" rather than "critique".

I think this type of approach is much needed particularly considering the increasing pressure on academia to prove its real world value in absurdly technocratic, limited terms. Perhaps, to effectively counteract such a tendency of restricting academia into (a certain type of) impacts-making business, academia needs to transform itself to produce knowledge which is indeed capable of acting on impending problems of the real world.

Though I totally agree on the need for "engagement" (that's what I aim to do as a researcher myself), I also got to wonder whether such an approach has been taken by many scholars who deeply engage with the complex realities of their time not because they attempted to achieve their theoretical ambitions in a self-indulgent manner but because they tended to act in the gutter of the real world using their pen. A similar question was raised by someone in the audience. Taking Raymond Williams as an example, the questioner said that Ang did not seem to acknowledge the activist tradition in the scholarship. Some researchers (though they might have been small in number) have been influencing the real world while delving into the complex nature of the phenomenon they are dealing with. In fact, this point does not contradict Ang's argument. But I was struck by the question of why "now" we feel the need to conceptualise this type of approach. Is it because the scholarship has gone too far playing with complex languages in its complacent position? Or is it because the entire system of producing knowledge itself has been too institutionalised putting us in a defensive position to reclaim what we have been doing or at least what we were supposed to do?

Furthermore, my free-floating thoughts brought me to the question of what kind of effect this claim for simplification would have in my home country, Korea. Though, I would say, social reality in Korea is much more complex compared to those of the Western world in general (as many other non-Western parts of the world are), such complexity has often been ignored by the scholarship in Korea. Mainly due to the impending tasks of catching up to the developed Western world (largely in the sense of economic development), the production of knowledge has been oriented towards solving problems and generating impacts for "practically" important national goals. Thus, critical voices have been extremely marginalised; for example, Marxist books were illegal till the late 1980s, and even today, the Ministry of Defence still publishes a list of seditious books. What I'd like to pinpoint is that because of such suppression of critical voices, the Korean scholarship has not had the chance to sufficiently engage in the complexity of its social reality from diverse perspectives. Even critical voices have had a compulsive need to make them be heard by simplifying things. What I'd like to acknowledge is that the abovementioned tendency of scholarship (which pursues complexity as an end itself) might not appear to a similar extent in other regions.

Joowon Yuk : 23 May 2012 12:14 |  Comments (2) |  Close comments |  Report a problem