Ulus Baker (1960 - 2007) was a Turkish-Cypriot sociologist, philosopher,
and public intellectual. He was born in Ankara, Turkey in 1960. He
studied Sociology at Middle East Technical University in Ankara, where
he taught as a lecturer until 2004. Baker wrote prolifically in
influential Turkish journals and made some of the first Turkish
translations of various works of Gilles Deleuze, Antonio Negri, and
other contemporary political philosophers. His profuse and accessible
work and the novelty of the issues he enthusiastically introduced to
Turkish-speaking intellectual circles, earned him a widely spread
positive reputation in early age. He died in 2007 in Istanbul. The text
in this edition is edited from essays and notes Ulus Baker wrote between
1995 and 2002. In these essays, Baker criticizes the sociological
research turning into an analysis of people's opinions. He explores with
an exciting clarity the notion of 'opinion' as a specific form of
apprehension between knowledge and point of view, then looks into
'social types' as an analytical device deployed by early sociologists.
He associates the form of 'comprehension' the 'social types' postulate
with Spinoza's notion of 'affections' (as a dynamic, non-linguistic form
of the relation between entities). He finally discusses the
possibilities of reintroducing this device for understanding our
contemporary world through cinema and documentary filmmaking, by
reinstating images in general as 'affective thought processes'. Baker's
first extensive translation to English provides us with a much-needed
intervention for re-imagining social thought and visual media, at a time
when sociology tends to be reduced to an analysis of 'big data', and the
pedagogical powers of the image are reduced to data visualization and
infographics.
