Professor David Peimer
The End of Enlightenment and Rationality?
Summary
Professor David Peimer embarks on a nuanced discussion of enlightenment, both historically and in the present day and questions how its perception has shifted overtime. Part 2 of 2.
Professor David Peimer
David Peimer is a professor of theatre and performance studies in the UK. He has taught at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and New York University (Global Division), and was a Fulbright Scholar at Columbia University. Born in South Africa, David has won numerous awards for playwriting and directing. He has written eleven plays and directed forty in places like South Africa, New York, Brussels, London, Berlin, Zulu Kingdom, Athens, and more. His writing has been published widely and he is the editor of Armed Response: Plays from South Africa (2009) and the interactive digital book Theatre in the Camps (2012). He is on the board of the Pinter Centre in London.
Great question. Be wonderful topic for a discussion Tom. I think when, yeah, when universalism, you know, takes centre stage and identity politics is a sort of side character, coming on stage a little bit peripheral, it’s a problem. And that’s exactly what I mean by the particularities of culture. When one ignores the particularities of culture, identity politics as you say, and only goes for universalism, we ignore identity politics at our peril. That’s part of what’s happening today. We’ve got to try and find that again, I keep going back to theatre, but, you know, and I’m indulging, but probably, but it is the metaphor for the human condition. You know, everything is, the conflict is built in, the antagonist is within the protagonist always. So identity politics must be part of a universalist idea, you know, however, that’s thought through.
Yeah, I think that, you know, in the way I’ve tried to allude to with the Kafka idea and the Holocaust is when you take science to such an extreme, the individual becomes an utter automaton. The individual becomes, you know, not the jargon of the cog, but the reduced man, the anonymity of the individual freaks them out. So they’re desperate to belong to some bigger idea, central unifying idea that I was speaking about earlier. And I think that way technology is going further, especially with AI coming more and more, it is happening. It’s Kafka taken to an extreme.