Introduction1. Aims of the Dissertation:

In this dissertation, my main purpose is to address Edward Said s secular criticism in relation to his two works namely Orientalism (1978) and Culture and Imperialism (1993). Said conceives of his criticism as critical consciousness. It is a theoretical work that addresses itself to the real world and is antagonistic to former traditions, particularly formalists and post-structuralists.1 Art and literature within formalist and post-structuralist schools of criticism are not tainted by political and historical discourses and practices -- art as an autonomous realm. Said departs from the Kantian disinterestedness of art and proposes his secular criticism.2 Secular or worldly criticism of Said is indebted to the

notion of secular history as formed by the Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico (16881744) in The New Science (1725), a historiographic study that influenced enormously Said until his death. Said builds his criticism upon a Viconian and humanist notion that history is made and unmade by human beings: ...historical knowledge based on the human being s capacity to make knowledges, as opposed to absorbing it passively, reactively and dully (Said 2004:11). Secularism, for Said, is the founding pillar and the basis of any serious study of literary works and cultural theorizing. The real world for Said constitutes the domains of the actual human societies (Said 1983:162). Thus, Said objects to textuality as a mode of literary criticism. Textuality from a Saidian point of view is the dissociation of texts and representations from history and the worldly character of cultures. His worldly criticism rested upon a central tenet: any non-material and unworldly reading is unintelligible. Texts1 2

Particularly Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes. Accrding to Sledon [t]he separation of art as an autonomous practice has its roots in Romanticism, (especially Kantian) (1989:3- 4).

1

and representations are fundamental to the creation of history and culture. The subject matter of literary criticism is also extra-literary; it is an approach antagonistic to technical criticism and the close reading of the New Criticism disciples (I.A. Richards). Thus we are dealing with literary criticism rather than literary theory. Technical criticism is qualified by Said as functionalist and opposed to the attempt to go beyond the theory as a prevailing literary critical practice (Said 1983:2). One eminent instance of textual criticism to which Said objects is Jacques Derrida s concept of diffrance. According to Said, Derrida s mise en abime dispenses with the human agency envisioning the text as already having internal coherence; in other words, a textual fetishism -- the text imagined as working alone within itself (184). In Literature and Literalism, (Jan 1993) Said likens contemporary art criticism to dogmatism. If art and literature are not religion, then criticism is not religion either. Said argues that criticism as a sort of scientism and a rigorous technical activity is the end of criticism. Criticism as a critical consciousness copes, in the Saidian enterprise, with the theory-oriented paradigms. In fact, the secular criticism is the questioning of intellectual allegiances and the gods of theory that Said found in Formalist and Structuralist practices. Instead, Saidian criticism pays little attention to the text s internal and formal operations, and far too much to its materiality (Said 1983:148). Another influential and particularly related topic to Said s secular criticism is the secular intellectual. This is what forms my second aim in this dissertation. It is to tackle Said s secular intellectual as related to his secular criticism. The project Said advances is to humanize the critical activities by putting emphasis on the role of the critic and intellectual. The intellectual as devoted to the pursuit of academy as well as politics, social affairs, conflicts and that are naturally not discussed by traditional intellectuals. According to Said, there is a dialectical relationship between the individual and the social. Throughout his

2

critical corpus, Said insists on the ability of the individual to reject tradition from a critical consciousness point of view. This is a necessary exercise to roam between academic scholarships and disciplines on the hand and to resist discipleship and uncritical academic solidarity on the other. Just as the text and criticism are worldly, the intellectual operates with networks of affiliation. It is the relationship of identification through culture and society. An affiliative paradigm breaks free from the constraints of ivory-tower positions of the traditional academics and intellectuals. Bill Aschcroft notices that criticism for Said is personal, active, entwined with the world (2001:32). Theoretically, this intellectual is the exact opposite of a cleric. To add, if criticism is a humanist enterprise, then the ideal intellectual for Said ought to be a humanist. In advancing the notion of agency, Said draws from various intellectual figures and practices. Noam Chomsky is a case in point. It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and expose lies (Chomsky: Feb1969). This role finds its echoes in almost all of Said s writings, and is manifest amply in the bulk of his political literature.3 In many instances, Said acknowledges Chomsky s productive role in his own intellectual formation. The objective, then, is to look for the most visible and important Chomskyan inspirations in Said s notion of the intellectual. To confront power is a prerequisite attitude in the Saidian formula of an engaged and committed intellectual as opposed to the treason of the clerics and the professional cast. Hence, more active roles are ascribed to the intellectual who, Said claims, has the same attributes of the author. When major debates are oriented towards the apocalyptic death of the author, (Barthes 1977) Said envisions a discussion of the author and the secular intellectual within the same framework -- that of their roles as similar. How the role and the notion of the author are to be seen and discussed as an intellectual? Said criticizes the structuralist s3

Power, Politics, and Culture: Interviews with Edward W. Said, ed. Gauri Viswanathan (NewYork: Pantheon Books, 2001).

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absence of the subject writing. In settling the contrast between the structuralist and Saidian conceptions of the author, I will discuss the Foucauldian author-function, for, as Said writesduring the last years of the twentieth century, the writer has taken on more and more of the intellectual s adversial attributes in such activities as speaking the truth to power, being a witness to persecution and suffering, and supplying a dissenting voice in conflicts with authority. (Said 2004:27)

To further elucidate the Saidian secular criticism I also aim to show how Said uses both conceptually and methodologically the tools of traditional humanism in order to provide alternative approaches and reading of a humanism that is self-reflexive and selfclarifying. Through his secular criticism, Said shows how politics and imperial ideologies are articulated in literary and cultural forms. Said s Orientalism (1978) is read by critics as the work that sets the tone for the colonial discourse analysis.4 Orientalism as a scholarship, Said claims, dispenses with humanism as centered on the agency of human individuality as breaking free of the constraints of the historical and social thrust and stands on fetish-like or abstract notions of collective identities and binarism: the West (ern) and Orient (al). Said uses Foucauldian discourse to show how knowledge about the Orient and Islam are accompanied by powerful historical process colonial rule.

It is in this regard that Said s criticism could amount to a materialist criticism by urging us to view the text as a dynamic field rather than a static block of words (Said 1983:157). It is a criticism that debunks the colonialist discourses inherent in Orientalism and the stereotyped, racist representations of the non-Europeans. Orientalism (as epistemological domains and as an institutional scholarship) for Said is produced and reproduced by rules (what can or cannot be said): its predominant strategy is to create

4

See for instance (Ahmad 1992). Productive discussions of the influence of Orientalism on the post-colonial studies in Edward Said: A Legacy of Emancipation and Representation (Iskander, Adel and Hakem Rustom eds. 2010). And particularly Hafez Ramzy s Edward Said and Contemporary Arab Culture: 170-190, and Edward Said and Anthropology by Nicholas B. Dirks from the same volume: 86-101.

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subordinated subjects in its very conceptual space. In an interview, Said insists on developing a humanism that invents new modes of studying cultures and counterattacking the highly regulated discourse of Orientalism.5 In turn, the new methods are in conflict with the essentialist and uncritical systems of thought he demonstrates as determinative of Orientalism. It is for the critic to unlearn the inherent dominative mode of approaching

Orientalism (Said 2003:333). That is to say, the critic needs to be aware of the monolithic or vague entities such as the Orient and the West. From another perspective, the texture of Orientalism could be seen as a counter-history in which knowledge is far from being objective or innocent but inextricably connected with power operations. It also explores in a crucial but complex feature the relationships between Western culture in general and imperialism. This is the major influence of Said s Orientalism on colonial discourse. In Benita Parry s words, colonial discourse is to construe the colonized as a racially

degenerate population in order to justify conquest and rule (Aschcroft et al.1995:41).

2. Structure of the Dissertation:

My paper is composed of three chapters. The first chapter is entitled

Worldliness

and its Affiliations: Alternative Approaches. It contains four main sub-sections and will deal with Edward Said s secular criticism and humanism in relation to textual criticism or unworldly criticism (Derrida s diffrance, etc). The first is entitled text and criticism. In it I shall dwell on the arguments that Said posited so powerfully to dislodge the filiative reading of Western literature. In section two dubbed literary criticism: filiation or

affiliation, the approach is purely comparative. I have found it useful then to elucidate Said s notion of filiation by instrumentalizing a famous filiative schemata of literary

5

Interview with Said: Orientalism, Arab Intellectuals, Reviving Marxism and Myth in Palestinian History .

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studies, namely Northrop Frye and his Anatomy of Criticism (1957). Most important then is the criticism Said advances in order to conceptualize new approaches to humanism. Section three is dedicated to the secular nature of culture Secularizing Culture. What

informed much of Said s criticism is his opposition to any sacred definition of culture. For it is to normalize submission and to obfuscate the potential of contestations and change. Culture is a discourse of power and however hegemonic it is, there is always a space to transgress, Said asserts. In the fourth section secular criticism and humanism, I shall demonstrate how Said s secular criticism is no other than a humanism, particularly in his posthumously Humanism and Democratic Criticism (2004). Said proposes an alternative academic pursuit for literary criticism, cultural theory and the humanities generally. The second chapter is entitled The Secular Critic and the Saidian Intellectual and it contains three sections. They examine three main themes: the Saidian intellectual, the influence of Chomsky and the type of the author that Said theorizes. It focuses on the Saidian model and function of the intellectual and the critic. The secular intellectual is to cope with former academic loyalties and to leave the ivory tower to engage in urgent and local political and social discourses. The secular world enables the intellectual to challenge the orthodoxy, the status quo and the dominance of the discourse around him -- what Said calls the worldliness of the intellectual. The oppositional and secular intellectual could better be seen, to my mind, when we trace back Said s own intellectual pedigree, Noam Chomsky for instance, as a seriously crucial element to the notion of the intellectual and the opposition to power and injustice. This is why the second section is entitled Edward Said, Noam Chomsky, and the role of the intellectual. Finally, what are the characteristics of the author that Said expanded in his works as an intellectual and a critic totally impatient with the structuralist and post-structuralist theorizing? How different Said s author is from that of Barthes s for example?

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The third chapter is dubbed Secular criticism as cultural resistance, and it contains two sections. In the first section, I will show the extent to which Said s basic presuppositions in Orientalism might rightly be dealt with as a materialist criticism in the Foucauldian sense. One instance of such a criticism is the post-colonial. Many critics debunk these arguments as tautological in Said s case: his humanism as irreconcilable with Foucauldian discourse and Niethzschian historicizing. But my argument in Orientalism and the postcolonial is that in debates related to Orientalism and Western representations of the Other, Said, of course, draws from the humanist tools, particularly close readings of canonical texts and works, and instrumentalizes Foucauldian discourse without being contradictory to his own definition of humanism. In this context, Ahmad criticizes Said as inconsistent and reduces Orientalism to a work of amateurism. In the same vein, Orientalism as discourse is not in contradiction with the author s main objective which is to stimulate and endorse analytical thought in foregrounding new ways of reading and studying cultures: the raison d tre of the post-colonial studies. By the same token, in the second section called criticism and empire, our concern is to demonstrate from a Saidian point of view how humanism has to do with imagining alternative readings of history and fiction. It is a project, I think, enormously persuasive to the post-modern theory and particularly similar to that of Linda Hutcheon s, though Said regards the postmodern as hugely limiting to the intellectual realms of inquiry and he rejects theory as thought-stopping. Humanism, Said thinks, is the ultimate resistance

to barbarity and injustices. It is a resistant intellectual preoccupation and a peculiar cultural resistance to culture as imperialism. In discussing all the above-mentioned themes, I will adopt a Saidian perspective secular criticism. It is a Saidian reading of Said in a sense. The choice is due to the influence of such a criticism on agent individuals in thinking about literature, culture and politics as

7

interdependent. That is to say the critical consciousness as an indispensable condition for the critic s task. And the conceptualization of cultures as sites of resistance as against accommodation and academic theoretical surmise. Secular criticism is also skeptical about different theoretical paths like deconstructive and Marxist criticisms given their determinism and incapacity to offer a critique of modern European cultures particularly imperialism and to engage critically with humanism.

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Chapter I: Worldliness and its Affiliations: Alternative Approaches

1. Text and Criticism

We can say that today s writing has freed itself from the dimension of expression, referring only to itself but without being restricted to the confined of its interiority, writing is identified with its unfolded exteriority. Michel Foucault What is an Author?

In this chapter our concern is mainly Said s worldliness as a strategy that denies the detachment of the study of text from its circumstance and reality. Worldliness is to question almost all orthodox literary traditions. Said s notion of worldliness stems from the recognition of the limitations of the theories (Said 1983:241). And far from being a fullyfledged and comprehensive tool of reading, worldliness allows the constant questioning of the functions of criticism and the roles of the critic. There is a typical attitude of Said when criticizing the functionalist discourse criticism as coming to its unfortunate limitations: the text is imagined as working alone with itself,

as containing a privileged, or if not privileged then unexamined and a priori principle of internal coherence (1983:148). Said, then, proposes a revolt against the somewhat

mystical and disinfected subject matter of literary theory (3). Literary criticism is not to be satisfied with idealizing and essentializing texts, to prevent them from being self-consuming artifacts and to preserve the special kind of cultural objects [they] really are (184). The mystification of literary texts is what Said calls the functionalist attitude. In the same vein, David Lodge qualifies the modern literary criticism as the establishment of cognitive theory of literature, that is a concept of the work of literature

as an object of public knowledge, containing within itself why it is so and not otherwise... 9

(Bergonzi 1970:372). To undo such a theory, Said insists that interpretation of text is a many-sided and unending thing that can never be settled once and for all (Said Jan1999). He, thus, gives more importance to the activities of reading and writing. Literary criticism is far from being a religion and to do justice to the activity of criticism, critics, when studying the history of criticism are to understand the history of literature critically 6. In other words, they do so without regulated sets of interpretation and production. To study literary texts critically is in reality to conceive criticism as a discipline that gives notice to its history as a discipline (Said: summer 1987). And if literary text inhabits a much contested cultural space, then its criticism could be but of political and historical nature.7 The relations between literature and history are to be considered. Texts and representations have to be seen as fundamental to the creation of history and culture (Loomba 1998:40). To study a text is to move into and out of it, challenging, then, the claim that literary criticism deals only with language in its rhetorical and poetic aspects. Said persuades us to view the text as a dynamic field, rather than a static block of word (1983:157). In The Problem of Textuality: Two Exemplary Positions, (summer 1978) Said criticizes the Derridian diffrance: that textuality is subject to certain instability is in Said s view an impasse. Textuality reduces the reference to the endless play of generated significance - La diffrance:By textuality Derrida means largely what the structuralists mean by that term. Any thing that can be known will be articulated as a text within a system of differences that exist, in Saussure s description, without positive terms (without a centre ), textuality is subject to a certain instability. [t]extuality will always be in progress and unfinished - and undecidable. (Con Davies and Schleifer 1996: 151)

Derrida s mise en abime is an agnostic doctrine Said argues ( The Problem of Textuality ). Such a reading method negates the effectiveness and the purpose of criticism. The oft-quoted Derridian il y a pas d hors texte reduces the world, culture, history and6 7

Ibid. Ibid.

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philosophy to a mere galaxy of texts. The principle of differentiation -- in language there are only differences, -- the freeplay of the sign (Derrida 1968), operates on what Said calls quasi-theological terms.8

The Derridian differences are

produced effects

but

without positive terms -- presence .9 That is to say, meaning as deffered endlessly. In M.H.Abrams s estimation, Derrida s meanings are reduced to a ceaseless echolia, a vertical and lateral reverberation from sign to sign of ghastly non-presences emanating from no voice, bombinating in a void (Lodge ed. 1999: 246). Then, only a systematic method can cope with this undecidability and the repetitively allusive meaning, Said writes (Said: summer 1987). Moreover, the worldly character of the text shapes its signification. The text s position in the world is the relation between textual and non-textual elements that constitute the discursivity of the text within an order of discourse. The Foucauldian discourse is a set of practices rather than structures. An order of discourse is the set of patterns in which power is exercised the relationships between the play of power and the production of knowledge

(Brooks 1997:50)10. A text is historicized by its language, and repetition as a process or a strategy that orients and constrains its interpretation. The main argument of Said is that texts do not only represent the world but actually are in the world:[w]orldliness, circumstantiality, the text s status as event having sensuous particularity as well as historical contingency, are considered as being incorporated in the text as infrangible part of 11 its capacity for conveying and producing meaning. (Said 1983:39)

To add, as a discourse formation in Foucauldian terms, the language of a text signifies reality by giving reference to objects of this very reality -- knowing that language is not reality; words are not interchangeable with objects ( Said: Jan 1993). The8

(Easthope and Mc Gown eds.1992:114).

9

Ibid. See (Said 2003:3- 4) for discussion of the Foucauldian discourse theory as instrumentalised by Said. 11 In Always on Top (Mar 2003), Said argues that is inconceivable how rewriting history, the task of the post-colonial writers and critics could be without a sense of revising imperialism and colonial archives as events. See also (Aschcroft 2001:22).10

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referentiality of language and texts as already fulfilling a function, a reference, or meaning in the world, is affirmed in Saidian tradition. Then he goes on to undermine any dissociation between the world and the text by asking how works reach out and hold on to other works, institutions, in historical moments, in society (Salusinszky 1987:136). We might arguably say that, in Saidian analysis, cultural texts and literary works are related to ownership and authority. The text s components are its language, its culture, and reading. Affiliation is to skeptically investigate and recreate the bonds between texts and the world, bonds that specialization and its institutions of literature have all but effaced (Said 1983:175). The texts negotiate the world, act upon, exclude and negate other texts. Texts are but ... system of forces institutionalised by the reining culture at some human cost to its various components (Said 1983:53). This is why Said objects to Derridian textuality which he considers as the antithesis of history, on the one hand (4). On the other, it illustrates the impossible match between the academy and the wider public. Furthermore, it estranges the public and political domains from their subject matter. In Said s formulation:[t]extuality is considered to take place, but by the same token it does not take place anywhere or at anytime in particular. It is produced, but by no one and at no time. It can be read and interpreted, although reading and interpreting are routinely understood to occur in the form of misreading and misinterpreting.12

If reading and writing are merely technical and systematized, then, the critical enterprise is an impasse -- no beyond the method. Criticism ends when the critic justifies the famous expression: interpretation is always misinterpretation. Not only is the

function of criticism reduced to nil but also the critic s intervention and work are denied any effectiveness. M.H.Abrams puts the ambiguity more curtly: [i]f all criticism (like all history) of texts can engage only with a critic s own misconstruction, why bother to carry on the activities of interpretations and criticism? (Lodge ed. 1999: 246)

12

Ibid.

12

It is to cope with the indecidability of meanings or the Derridian interplay of significance ad infinitum (Derrida 1967). Saidian textuality is to envision literary texts as worldly enshrined in social and historical circumstances. And presumably, criticism is within its articulation, its struggles for definition (Said 1983:51). Beyond the lifeless reading model -- il y a pas d hors texte [no beyond the text] -- criticism, which is a cognitive activity (a form of knowledge), cannot consider its domain as solely the province of the text. In addition, considering the text as an event is a priori an affirmation of its capacity of conveying meaning. If to be inventive and creative, criticism ought to be openly contentious (Said: summer 1987). In other words, criticism is the humanizing of texts. Said s lesson is that if literary, but also cultural texts are worldly, a historic discursive practice[s] as he puts it, then, criticism is part of this discursivity (Said 1983:51). Said agrees with Foucauldian criticism: The text is a process that alludes to its historical will to be visible and has its place. What Said calls the worldliness of the text (and the critic, the subject of the next chapter) is what can be traced back to his early writing. In Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography (1966), Said claims that in almost all of Conrad s oeuvre, the speaking subject is situated and the attempts of analysis begin to be comprehensible when taking into consideration this situatedness. The fiction of Conrad according to Said is of personal and existential qualities. That is to say, Conrad s narratives are unfinished but always on the making, cementing a link between the writer and the readers. The author is not the center of the meaning. The life of the seaman and that of the novelist are inseparable. He [Conrad] opposed analysis, authorial interpretation, because he believed that reality could be formulated only in terms of actions (Said 1966:43). This argument further justifies the impossible separation of literature, history, and in the same line, criticism. Conrad s

13

imaginative works on Africa were not anathema to his imperial setting and environment, Said claims. In Orientalism, Said makes this point clearer. Though literature and culture are routinely considered to be dissociated from politics and history ...[they have] regularly seemed otherwise to me, and certainly my study of Orientalism has convinced me...that society and literary culture can only be understood and studied together (Said 2003: 27).

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2. Literary Criticism: Filiation or Affiliation

[W]e cannot separate literature from other kinds of social practice, of thought or of method in such a way as to make them subject to different laws. Raymond Williams

In studying modern intellectual history and Orientalism, which he regards as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient, Said outlines two patterns of relationships between the individual mind and the world: filiation and affiliation. Filiation, Said argues, is the mere natural continuity between one generation and the next (1983:16). It presupposes a set of norms that seeks its way through perpetual justification to exist. Edward Said s analysis of Lawrence, Joyce, Pound, and T.S.Eliot illuminates the continuity of a tradition by filiation.13 Individual talents are studied and revered, for they represent the collective will. The literary works, within European thought are exclusive and their sacred quality functions as type of discourse. They are conceived as children of the same family. The filiative relationship shows the West s incapacity to envision or imagine new and plural ways of conceiving human relationships. It establishes the transhuman and the worldless. It belongs to the realm of nature and religion.[t]he curricular structures holding European literature departments make that perfectly obvious: The great texts, as well as the great teachers and the great theories, have an authority that compels respectful attention not so much by virtue of their content but because they are either old or they have power; they have been handed on in time or seem to have no time, and they have traditionally been revered, as priests, scientists, or efficient bureaucrats have thought. (1983:23)

The natural links within the humanities are speculative and not matters of exclusion and inclusion: European and non-European. The structures of knowledges change and so does the study of literature (criticism). Instead, [n]ew cultures, new societies, and emerging visions of social, political, and aesthetic order now lay claim to the humanist s attention, with an insistence that can no longer be denied (Said 1983:21). Crossing the boundaries13

Ibid.

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between the disciplines for thought and different approaches to human experiences and cultures is what Said suggests. In turn, they will question European culture s conception of itself as one grand hotel in the words of Jim Collins, or the uncritical and constant research of centre/origin. One of the proponents of filiative reading of Western literature is Northrop Frye and his widely debated systematic theory of criticism in Anatomy of Criticism (1957). Frye s Anatomy, as indicated in the Introduction, is to be regarded as interconnected group of suggestions which, it is hoped, will be of some practical use to critics and students of literature (Frye 1957:3). From the very beginning, we notice the narrow scope of criticism as a top-down acquisition rather than a constant questioning of the activity of criticism itself, as Said argues. Criticism, according to Said, is skeptical and reflectively open to its own failing (1983:26). The elements of the filiative ethos are to decide what is and what is not the domain of criticism. Thus, the interest of criticism as a science as well as an art comes from the a priori literariness of a subject field called literature. In total opposition, Saidian criticism is to position the activity itself between culture and system: criticism as [t]he inevitable trajectory of critical consciousness [that] is to arrive at some acute sense of what political, social, and human values are entailed in the reading, production and transmission of every text.14

On the other end of the spectrum, Frye conceptualizes a theory of criticism as a set of principles applicable to the whole of literature and accountable for every comprehensive type of critical procedure. Here is the shadow of T.S.Eliot s essay The Function of Criticism. The system Eliot has in mind does not recognize the peculiarity of an artist (generally a poet), unless in a tradition. Frye s function of criticism implies a view of literature as a scientific corpus, explicable from within and isolated from other disciplines,

14

Ibid.

16

for it contains exclusively disengaged elements. criticism runs as follow:

The argument of Frye for a scientific

It may also be a scientific element in criticism which distinguishes it from literary parasitism on the one hand, and the superimposed critical attitude on the other. The presence of science in any subject changes it character from the casual, to the causal, from the random and intuitive to the systematic, as well as safeguarding the integrity of the subject from external invasion. (1957:7)

To systematize the study of literature is to exclude non-literary elements and to explicitly indicate that literary criticism can by no means be related to a politico-religious color filter. In Theory of Literature (1956), the two authors (Ren Wellek and Austin Warren) grimly advance a thesis which says that it is impossible to unite poetics (theory of literature) with criticism (evaluation) unless in the presence of finite literary works (the great canons), schemes, criteria and categories. In turn, this union, the two authors continue, allows the emergence of some system of concepts, some points of reference and some generalizations. Frye s Anatomy is the embodiment of this project with its theory of modes, theory of symbols, theory of myths, and theory of irony. Even more, Frye

emphasizes the organic complicity already existent in humanistic scholarships. The authority of Western humanistic scholarships comes not only from the orthodox canons of literary monuments handed down through the generations but also from the way this continuity reproduces the filial continuity of the chain of biological procreation (1957:24). It is no accident that Aristotle s biological structures appeals to Frye. A criticism or an ethical criticism (Warren and Wellek 1956:246) where non-European and equally non-literary substances are deposited away from the humanistic scopes. From a Saidian point of view, to consider literary works as properly an artistic object is to dismiss what is vital and interesting. The affiliation is to make sense of literary works in their historical and contingent nature. The critic is to connect ... [the literary oeuvres] to other disciplines in order to apprehend the social, historical, and political surroundings 17

constraining [their] raison d tre (Said 1983:26). The huge disagreement between Said s criticism and Frye s, is, I think, due to the interpretation of the concept of representation. For the former, texts and cultures represent the world and the other cultures within a play of power. For the latter, consciousness. historical fictions are not constructed out of historical

Historical fictions tell us nothing about a period of history, but are

exemplary; they illustrate action, and are ideal in the sense of manifesting the universal form of human action (Frye 1957:84). It is safe to argue, then, that criticism as Said thinks is a combination of writing and reading the integrity, the complementarity and interdependence of texts, literary works and their cultural manifestations. In doing so, it is for the critic and the interpretive community to resist the tendency to work out a simple and autonomous theory of criticism. It is almost tautological to conceive a systematic criticism. By definition, criticism, for Said, is critical consciousness and doctrine is its enemy. Frye s model of criticism, in total opposition, is a handed-down critical discipline, a purification of literature and its criticism because it pays too much importance to the texts formal operations. [T]he main goal [of interpretation], Said says, is to create in your students a critical consciousness... (Salusinszky 1987:146). Being theoretically godless, Said stimulates his readers to reconsider their philosophical stances and foundations, for the world that academics are speaking of is only abstract domain or fiefdom in Said s word. Theoretical virtuosity is but a critical inertia and political quietism. It does make out of itself the world. Said himself embodies the idea of affiliating with schools of criticism, philologists and intellectuals such as Leo Spitzer, Erich Auerbach, Antonio Gramsci and Michel Foucault without being uncritical of their ideas and suppositions. The affiliation with the ideology and society enables the critic and the intellectual to pursue their oppositional stances as a constant work of the critical consciousness. Perhaps, the long lasting legacy of

18

Said is the technique of trouble that he calls affiliation. Said evokes the idea that says: to make criticism is to acknowledge that it must have a future. Accordingly, criticism is a changing platform of ideas and orientations which collegiality and lax filiative appropriation of systems would only inhibit its progress and sophistication. In other words, affiliation rejects the authority and the comfort of the curricular. Even though Said was affiliated with Foucauldian structuralism, he was uneasy about Foucault s amoralism and found in Chomsky s epistemological radicalism an authentic and humane intellectual position.The history of thought, to say nothing of political movements, is extravagantly illustrative of how the dictum solidarity before criticism, means the end of criticism. I take criticism so seriously as to believe that, even in the very midst of battle in which one is unmistakably on one side against another, there should be criticism, because there must be critical consciousness if there are to be issues, problems, values, even lives to be fought for. (Said 1993:28)

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3. Secularizing Culture

Saidian criticism rests on a constant questioning of the discursive formations within societies. The critic is to view culture as a hegemonic discourse, and given the secular nature of this very discourse, there are always possibilities for alternative analysis non-

coercive knowledge of cultures. Michel Barett points out in The Politics of Truth: From Marx to Foucault (1991) that culture as discourse is in fact relations of power (Brooks 1997:49-50). Culture, nevertheless, and whether it is colonialism, imperialism or Zionism, gives space to a critique that connects it to the world and to the shared, lived and intertwined histories of oppressors and oppressed. Here is what Said plainly qualifies as the eminent feature of all cultures. In U.S.: A Disputed History of Identity (Sep 2004), Said points out that[n]o culture is understandable without some sense of this ever present source of creative provocation from the unofficial; to disregard this sense of restlessness within each culture, and to assume that there is complete homogeneity between culture and identity is to miss what is vital and fecund.

Cultural theory emerged as one of the polemical areas where different views of society, politics, race, history and other not less complex categories struggle for a definition. It all ends in setting schools of analysis and conflicting perspectives. What Thomas Bender calls the cultural turn is that every analysis becomes cultural. Said s concern is how cultures have been produced, possessed and consumed (1993:9). One could assert that he proposes a universal definition of culture. Culture, for Said, is hegemonic and dominating. Said defines it as a system of values saturating downward almost everything within its purview15. Nevertheless, his cultural analysis is totally antagonistic. In an interview, Said declares that: I find myself instinctively on the other side of power.16

In fact there is much of truth in

15

16

Ibid. Joan Smith, Cultures Aren t Watertight: Interview with Edward W. Said, Guardian, 10 December 2001.

20

this. That is to say on the side of criticism and the dismantling of this power being constantly its victim. The oppressive criteria of culture as theorized within the Anglo-Saxon world provoked doubt in Saidian critique. The tradition, from Mathew Arnold s Culture and Anarchy to Raymond Williams s Culture and Society, as William Hart (2000) thinks, played a central role in shaping Said s cultural criticism. What Said objects to in this tradition, though he agrees with much of what Williams writes, is the quasi-religious authority of culture. Culture is religion in the sense of being conceived as a system of authority. Arnold s culture, for instance, is of repressive nature and it is longing for the incarnation within a state. Of course, culture, within this framework, is exterior to the state hence the correspondence is inevitable. The state or national culture is the collective ego of the community. Said qualifies the best that has been said and done as a moral concept. Culture for Arnold becomes a trope for atavistic religious ideas and commitments such as nationalism, Orientalism, and imperialism, according to Hart. For the former, culture is secular in being the negation of the religious; for the latter it is almost religious (Hart 2000:26-27). The notion of a secular culture is the exclusion of religious foundations of it. This is what we may call the worldly turn of culture. Secularism is an epistemological blueprint and a political vision, according to Said. Cultural criticism is the other of the religious criticism because Said and Arnold disagreement turns on the proper relationship between religion and cultural critique (19). Arnoldian culture replaces the decline of religious thought by a more scientific Christianity as Hart notices. It keeps its moralistic basis that Said criticizes in Challenging Orthodoxy and Authority (1993:303-325). What justifies my claim is that Arnold s functional culture is a diagnosis of social upheavals through what Hart calls Arnold s gospel of culture. The critique of culture, then, is an apologia critica. Like culture, criticism in the Arnoldian

21

sense, is the quest of perfection. [S]uch disinterestedness eschews the critique of its own procedures in favour of a pedagogic imperative of disseminating what is self-evidently the best that has been thought and said (Con Davies and Schleifer 1992:48). In total contrast, and drawing from Noam Chomsky s reconstitution of ideology, Said disagrees with the conception of culture as a pharmakon (cure and ill), because it rests on hierarchical grounds and racial evaluations. It is about setting the boundaries of identity. Said s culture recognizes the discourse sensitive nature existent in any worldly culture. The real relations of society do not exist isolated from their cultural and

ideological practices. The interconnections between the ideological and the social practices determine how people thought, lived and spoke in Said s words (Brooks 1997:50). Said rejects any definition of culture as having pre-existing essence or in a pristine state. Culture in Arnold s tradition, by opposition, is religious and authoritarian. It is an apology for an oppressive state in the words of Said. It is this very notion that sets Saidian critical consciousness in opposition to Arnoldian religious and Manichean consciousness. Secular culture is by definition skeptic to religious matters and authority. It is a secular process that wards off the appeal to the vague abstractions and the extra-human components of a sacred and moralistic culture. In fact, Said s culture is a suspicion of Arnold s. Culture, whether imperialism or colonialism, defines its enemy. Nevertheless it always is accompanied by a critique that connects it to the world of power and politics, as Said thinks. Said s culture is a site of contest inspired by Raymond Williams s residual and emergent cultures. Williams s formulation that however dominant a social system may be, the very meaning of its domination involves a limitation or selection of the activities it covers, so that by definition it cannot exhaust all social experience which therefore always potentially contains space for a social institution and alternatives intentions is the hub of Saidian culture (Said: Sep 1985). Any culture is far from being a homogeneous block.

22

Cultures are not water tight as Said puts it. To add, culture provides elements of resistance to its hegemonic discourses. Said plainly qualifies this resistance as the eminent feature of all cultures. In The Uses of Culture, Said critiqued Samuel Huntington s thesis of the clash of civilizations on the basis of this notion of culture as always providing spaces for

contestations (Said 2000: 104). To purify culture, from a Saidian point of view, is an intellectual laxity. Cultures operate not monolithically but are in fact changing and constantly in a state of metamorphosis. What is interesting in studying cultures and civilizations is not the way they are unchanging essence but the various mixtures and hybrids that...compose cultures and civilizations (Said 2000:140). Elsewhere, Said

evaluates the clash of civilizations as the clash of ignorance because it does undermine the discontinuities and disruptions that characterize any culture on the one hand and identifies culture with identity, on the other. To perceive culture and identity as facts of nature, unchanging, or transmissed from one generation to another, is ahistoric. In addition, [i]t is fundamentalism, not analysis of culture.... (142). In the same vein, Huntington relies on notion of civilization identity, the founding pillar of labels such as Islam, West,

Confucianism (Said: Oct 2001). It is a belligerent kind of thought, Said argues, and that fortifies the state and its power while ignoring the dynamics of each culture (Said Oct2001). If culture for Arnold is to combat rebellious elements in society, it is an arsenal of values and canons against impurity for Huntington. Said goes further and elucidates the uncritical appropriation of a pure and isolated culture and qualifies its manifestations as wary, coercive and with violent effects. In Ideology of Difference, (1985) Said writes that the Palestinians are considered to be different, a murderous race of mindless fanatics. Difference is a crucial issue central

23

to many recent theoretical and interpretive discussions.

17

This insight feeds into Saidian

perception of Western culture as defining its enemy and its Other. From a Western lens, other cultures are conceived through the perspectives of pathology/or therapy (Said 1993:303). Accordingly, Said debunks Bernard Lewis s arguments in What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle East Response (2002): Islam as antagonistic to the modern nation-state and democracy. Lewis s account is belligerent. It culminates in a violent and arrogant as well as superficial definition of Islam as anti-modern, anti-American and antirational. It construes absurdly reductive passions, simply because it rests on governability and on a striking binarism of right and wrong defined by power and not having it (Said: Jul 2002). It follows that Said views Islam and West as inadequate banners to a genuine and complex study of culture. Said defies the vague abstractions and the abuse of giant entities (Said: Aug1996). Culture, traditionally conceived as ideas of good and evil, belonging and not belonging, is highly problematic for Said....The development and maintenance of every culture require the existence of another different and competing alterego. The construction of identity-for identity, whether of Orient or Occident, France or Britain, while obviously a repository of distinct collective experiences, is finally a construction - involves establishing opposites and others whose actuality is always subject to the continuous interpretation and reinterpretation of their differences from us. 18

17

See also for analysis of difference and Otherness related to the Palestinian question in Propaganda and War (Sep2001). 18 (Bov ed. 2000:69).

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4. The Secular Criticism and Humanism

In Secular Criticism (Said 1983:2-3), the author debunks what seems to him the four prevailing literary practices: practical criticism, academic literary history, literary appreciation and interpretation and literary theory. His main argument is that these realms are divorced from their real connections with power....19

On the contrary, Saidian notion

of culture considers fields of knowledges as presupposing and constituting power relations. In what follows, I will first focus on what criticism is for Said, and second on the extent to which secular criticism yields and reaches to other varieties of criticism, mainly

materialist criticism

with its declared Foucauldianism. Then, I shall point out the

similarities between Saidian criticism and the later school of cultural analysis. Secular criticism as humanism , Said argues, is the ultimate criticism. So what are the

characteristics of Saidian humanism? And how can one assess Saidian criticism as humanism? Said s Worldliness or the circumstantial reality of the text and the critic is foundational to the activity he calls affiliation. Affiliation is to study and to recreate the bonds

between texts and the world, bonds that specialization and the institutions of literature have all but effaced (Said 1983: 175). In other words, affiliation is to critically read literary works and culture as phenomena in the world. By definition, affiliation is critical consciousness. Thus, every act of interpretation is to connect literature to other disciplines in order to apprehend the social, historical, and political surrounding its raison d tre (26). It is in this sense that affiliation dispenses with the specialization. Accordingly, affiliation as a critical consciousness is to constantly undo the theory. To quote from Said:Criticism in short is always situated; it is skeptical, secular, and reflectively open to its own failing. This is to say that is value-free. Quite the contrary, for the inevitable trajectory of19

Ibid.

25

critical consciousness is to arrive at some acute sense of what political, social, and human values are entailed in the reading, production and transmission of every text. To stand between culture and system, is therefore to stand close to a concrete reality about which political, moral, and social judgments have to be made and if not only made, then exposed and 20 demystified.

Criticism, as described by Said, reaches for the various cultural domains surrounding the works of criticism and interpretation. Criticism as such is not doctrinal or a theoretical position. Texts of all kinds are the vehicles of politics in so far as they mediate the fabric of social, political and cultural formations. It is in this sense that Saidian criticism provides critical reading with knottier design and a move away from the disillusionment of modernism. In the same vein, Said s criticism collides with Raymond Williams s argument that we cannot separate literature and art from other kinds of social practice, in such way to make subject to quite special and distinct laws (Brannigan 1998: 1). What Williams calls cultural materialism (Williams was the first to coin it in Marxism and Literature) is a method that privileges power relations as the important contexts for literary and cultural text productions and interpretation. In New Historicism and Cultural Materialism (1998), John Brannigan defines cultural materialism as [e]xplor[ing] literary texts within the context

of contemporary power structures texts always have material function within power structures literary texts behave in a direct and meaningful way within contemporary social and political formation (1998:17). Secular criticism to Said is the recognition of the social role of literature and the crucial function of the critical intellectual in assessing literature and society alike. Said asserts that reading critically is but the awareness of the political circumstances surrounding the text, the reader and the author. It is a criticism that challenges the ideological vision

implemented and sustained not only by direct domination and physical force but much more effectively over a long time by persuasive means , the quotidian process of hegemony very

20

Ibid.

26

often creative, inventive, interesting and above all executive analysis (Said 1993: 109).

yields surprisingly well to

To add, Said instrumentalized Foucauldian discourse, for Foucault s scholarship, generally, and according to Said, is ironic, skeptical, savage in its radicalism and amoral in its overturning of orthodoxies, idols, and myths, as Yumna Siddiqui says in Edward Said,

Humanism, and Secular Criticism (2005). The Foucauldian side of Said is all the more manifest when acknowledging the obligation to orient criticism toward the working of institutions and uncovering the structures of domination. In Orientalism, Said states his indebtedness to Foucault s discourse:[w]ithout examining Orientalism as a discourse one cannot possibly understand the enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage and even produce the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively (Said 2003:3)

Foucault takes a more prominent and controversial role in Said s conception of secularism. Orientalism, for instance, arises from a critique of the human sciences, and the obligation to develop a more worldly account of the human condition in Western society (Foucault s discourse as the eminent example of this endeavor). It is the anti-humanism of Foucault -- Man is a construct and no longer the central meaning. Said also sheds skepticism about the enunciative modalities that shape Orientalist scholarship.

Enunciative modalities, as used by Foucault are rules of discursive formation that determine who speaks, the authority with which they speak, and the institutional site from which they speak (Hart 2000: 66). Discourse exerts its social force in almost all-

encompassing network and obtains its greatest force when diffuse and determines what is acceptable as knowledge (Foucault 1972). Discourse, then, is not merely what is exchanged in communication, but has a powerful material effect. This is to say, it is as subject to the forces within society.

27

Yet, Said departs from Foucauldian capillary power. An individual can have efficacy in society. In his analyses of Orientalism, authors are considered as individual scholars but amidst a tradition, too. They participate in the representation of the Orient. on the Orient Every writer

assumes some Oriental precedent, some previous knowledge of the Orient,

to which he refers and on which he relies (Said 2003:20). Orientalists draw from the predecessors, the historical a priori or what Foucault calls archive or the library of the libraries. Said s secular criticism, then, allows a greater role for the individual intervention in discourse. Said states that unlike Foucault, to whose work I am greatly indebted, I do believe in the determining imprint of individual writers upon the otherwise anonymous collective body of texts constituting a discursive formation like Orientalism (2).

Accordingly, Foucault s knowledge/power is a crucial element of analysis to what Said calls the textual attitude of traditional Orientalism. In Orientalism, Said elucidates how power relations are never possible without domains of knowledge which presuppose and constitutes power relations. That is to say an Orient imaginatively conceptualized gets its birth once the Orient ceases to exist. Texts create not only knowledge about the Orient as reality, but its very reality as Said puts it. In a Foucauldian mode, Said relates knowledge of Islam with control and political hegemony. If knowledge of Islam was associated with control, with power, with the need to understand the mind and ultimate nature of a rebellious and somehow resistant culture as a way of dealing administratively with an alien being at the heart of expanding empire, especially those of Britain and France, it becomes a national security concern in America after the Cold War (Said: Jun 2002). Said goes further and argues that debates of Islamic threat and terrorism are part of a discipline managed to control populations and not to illustrate objective facts (Said: Jun1986). Elsewhere, this discipline is qualified as the blind arrogance, its key elements was imperial perspective, that way of looking at a distant

28

foreign reality by subordinating it in one s own gaze (Said: Jun2003). Such a disclosure ( terrorism ) and its practitioners share common assumptions and systems of thought and signify that something of an ideological order exists. The same argument is found in Said s analysis of Heart of Darkness. Conrad s Heart of Darkness allows no alternative view than that of the colonizer s, Said argues (Said 1993:186). It rejects representations outside its own closed discourse. In a short essay entitled Through Gringo Eyes: With Conrad in Latin America, (Apr 1988) Said suggests a strategy of reading that resists imperialist ideologies: [a]ll Conrad can see is a world in which every opposition to the West only confirms its wicked power (Said 1993: 277). By the same token, Said relates Bernard Lewis s What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle East Response (2002) to the rush to know about Islam and Muslim cultures in the post 9/11 America. Lewis s account, Said claims, feeds into a violent and arrogant definition of Islam as anti-modern and anti-America. Lewis s version is then qualified by Said as absurdly reductive passion, simply because it rests on a binarism of right and wrong defined by power and not having it (Said: Jul 2000). 21 Against this system of representations which operate according to a dominant structure of regulations, Said proposes a bifocal reading of history and literary texts. He calls it contrapuntal reading. Contrapuntal reading, Said writes, must take account of both

process, that of imperialism and that of resistance to it (1993: 11). It is about new, noncoercive and oppositional knowledge. The new knowledge is to acknowledge what has been excluded. To read the cultural archive contrapuntally and not univocally is to practice criticism as a process against a systematic or method-bound thought. It also is a dynamic movement towards a platform where dominated and dominant, imperialist apology and anti imperialist resistance are discussed together. Contrapuntal reading amounts to the21

See also Orientalism: An Exchange where Said riposted to Lewis s The Question of Orientalism in The New York Review of Books (29) Aug 12, 1982.

29

destabilization of the monovocal discourse (Orientalism, colonialism ). Thus, capturing the consolidated vision of this very discourse as a continuous enterprise regulated from within, with its own terms (Said 1993:75-76). That is why, I think, Said s contrapuntal reading has as a foundation Foucault s notion of new history. In the Introduction to The Archeology of knowledge (1972), Foucault defines what he calls the new history, which he argues is emerging from the history of ideas, history of science, of thought, of literature, of philosophy. The new history is in contrast to the structures of the history proper or the history of historian. It is concerned with

discontinuity and rupture, the moments of mutations, transformations and difference. It is to destabilize the history of a given discourse (e.g. the novel, the travel writing, ethnography, sexuality ). Foucault lays out the contours of the new history as such:

The problem is no longer of one tradition, one of tracing a line, but one of division, of limits; it is no longer one of lasting foundation, but one of transformations that serve as new foundations, the rebuilding of foundations. What one is seeing, then, is the emergence of a whole field of questions, some of which are already familiar, by which this new form of history is trying to develop its own theory: how is one to specify the different concepts that enable us to conceive of discontinuity (threshold, rupture, break, mutation, transformation)

(5) What Said calls humanism is indebted, I think, to the emergence of a whole field of questions (Foucault). For what is crucial to humanistic thought , even in the very act of sympathetically trying to understand the past, Said argues, is that it is a gesture of

resistance and critique, on the one hand (Said: Jan2000). On the other, it is to turn back criticism to the world. It is a humanism that connects human principles to the world in which we live as citizens. Said was interested in human endeavor and history , in all that was made by human beings , not by supernatural forces, and thus in what can be changed by human beings (Ghazoul: Dec 2003). This intellectual activity is to overturn orthodoxies, idols and myths. It is in this respect, I think, that a Foucauldian scholarship is committed to

30

controvert the dynastic role thrust upon him [the intellectual] by history or habit (Bov ed. 2000: 67).22 Within Saidian tradition, the challenge of intellectual life resides in the dissent against the manufacturing consent. By virtue of this dissensus, Said s humanism could be considered as the criticism of religion and dogma, in turn, an aspect of the philosophy of the Enlightenment. The legacy of Enlightenment is the belief that the rational, secular, critical pursuit of knowledge can lead to human emancipation and progress as Yuman Siddiqui tells us while discussing Said s humanism and secular criticism (2005). Said believes in the Viconian principles that man is the measure of things. A great deal of human will and agency are prerequisite to the practice of humanism according to Said. Action resides in the individual. Saidian humanism is the pursuit of inquiry and creation. In Humanism and Democratic Criticism (2004), Said defines humanism s horizons as about neither withdrawal nor exclusion.[Q]uite the reverse: its purpose is to make more things available to critical scrutiny as the product of human labor, human energies for emancipation and enlightenment, and just as importantly, human misreading and misinterpretation of the collective past and present. (22)

Thus, it is the failure of the old humanism that urges scholars and committed intellectuals to think of a new humanism free from its Eurocentrism towards liberationist

ends (Said 1993:33). The whole project of writing back to empire is based on a conviction of human agency to negotiate historical experiences, to imagine and to provide alternatives to the current state of affairs and official History. There is a dialogic relationship between the cultural discourse of the colonized and oppressed and that of the empire and metropolis. Said points out the possibilities of being critical of humanism in the name of humanism and that, schooled in its abuses of Eurocentrism and empire, one could fashion a different kind of humanism that was cosmopolitan and text-bound that absorbed the great lessons of the

22

In Criticism between opposition and counterpoint, the author states the figures that inspired the oppositional work of Said (Bov ed. 2000).

31

past

(Said 2004:11). From Saidian perspective, it is for the secular and humanist

intellectuals to reflect upon those possibilities. In her article Edward Said and Islam, (Dec 2003) Ferial J. Ghazoul offers thought that justifies the claim that criticism in Saidian tradition is the criticism of dogma and religion. In the spirit of Vico s world of nations , and drawing from New Science, Said argues that [t]he secular notion that historical world is made by men and women, and not by God Hence Vico s notion of sapienza poetica, historical knowledge based on the

human being s capacity to make knowledge, as opposed to absorbing it passively, reactively and dully (Said 2004: 11 italics in the original). From a Nietzschian perspective, Said s secular criticism is iconoclastic for it breaks with the domains of the divine and the modern divinities of the gods of theory, nationalism and the state worship. Said is interested in what is humane in criticism -- humanizing criticism.

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Chapter II: The Secular Critic and the Saidian Intellectual

1.

Worldliness and the functions of the Saidian Intellectual

The following chapter addresses one of the major characteristics of the intellectual within Saidian tradition the intellectual s worldliness. I will equally discuss the roles of

the intellectual as envisaged by Said. Worldliness as defined by Said is the provisional and contingent grounds [which are] the only ground we have. It is about the historical

knowledge and world as made and unmade by human beings, a principle to which Said adheres completely. Accordingly, Said conceives himself as a foundationalist.23 It is the worldliness that makes possible any intellectual efficacy in social affairs. Accordingly, the secular intellectual opposes cultural dogma, confronts doxa (religion) and raises embarrassing questions. The dissent of the intellectual is to dispense with the ideological, national and filiative interests. This figure distrusts power and goes beyond the easy certainties provided by our background, language, nationality (Said 1994: xi). The Saidian intellectual is someone whose work is shaped by where it takes place, whose interests it serves, how it jibes with a consistent and universalist ethic, how it discriminates between power and justice, priorities what it reveals of one s choices and

(Said 1994: 89). The critic and the intellectual, just as the text and criticism,

operate in networks of affiliations. He is also meant to subvert the status quo and the conventional, to draw attention to the ambivalences of dominant discourses and the suffering communities as well as to the prevailing injustices. The aim of the intellectual work, in the

23

Said also elaborates the idea of human being as making their own history while discussing Vico and Ibn Kaldoun in Making History: Constructing Reality (Said 2000 :244-248) .

33

Saidian enterprise, is to advance the cause of liberty and human knowledge. It is for the intellectual to represent the collective suffering, to witness the hardships of peoples and to keep their memory. The intellectual is constantly critical of power apparatuses and conventional spirits. Among his roles is that of universalizing the crisis and humanizing the suffering of his own people and others. It is to represent and incarnate a message and a vision to a public. In Speaking Truth to Power, part of The 1993 Reith Lecture, Said defines the intellectual as a humanist whosemain function is to project a better state of affairs, one that corresponds more closely to a set of moral principles peace, reconciliation, abatement of suffering certainly in writing and speaking, one s aim is not to show everyone how right is, but in trying to induce a change in the moral climate where by aggression is seen as such, the unjust punishment of peoples or individuals is either prevented or given up, and the recognition of the rights and democratic freedom is established as a norm for everyone, not invidiously for a selected few.24

In addition, the Saidian intellectual is, in his own words, an amateurist figure antagonistic to the priestly and abstruse professionalism. Instead, what Said calls the amateur critic opposes the cult of the expertise, cultural dogma and policy intellectuals. This figure of the intellectual for whom no worldly power is too big and imposing, as Said points out. (Said 1994: 8). Said refers to French intellectual.25

Amateurism is the opening

of public spaces for practical criticism. And according to Said [t]he cult of expertise has never ruled the world of discourse as much as it now does in the United States where the policy intellectual can feel that he or she surveys the entire world (Said 2004:123). The humanism of the non- expert and the oppositional intellectual is to develop a critical language capable of doing two things. The first is to unveil the constituted power which is a political task, given that to be critical of domination is to be oppositional. That is to say, to situate truth as resistant to power and be able to establish a range of sites of resistance and sites of opposition, inside and outside the academy. Here is an allusion24 25

(Said 1994). See Said s view of Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Paul Sartre as exemplary public intellectuals.

34

to Foucauldian assertion that when there is power there is resistance (Brooks 1997: 134). Second, the role Said ascribes to the intellectual could equally be seen as Foucauldian. The intellectual, Said writes, is dialectically, appositionally to uncover and elucidate to

challenge and defeat both an imposed silence and the normalized quiet of unseen power (Said 2004:135). The Saidian intellectual, I think, is also the genealogist that Foucault describes in his Lecture: 7 January 1976. By genealogy Foucault means the painstaking rediscovery of struggles together with their hierarchy and all their privileges of a theoretical avant-guard were limited (Foucault 1976). The contest between powerful systems of representation and interests and others less powerful is the essence of the analysis of power as representation and domination. The attempt to speak in the name of the silenced is what Foucault calls a return of knowledge or the insurrection of subjugated knowledges of struggles and that leads to a dissent genealogy with an emancipatory potential (Foucault 1976). From the same perspective, the concept of the permission to narrate that Said elaborates is an endeavor to a new history. And we may see its similarity with Foucauldian return of knowledge.26

Two more reasons may explain the supposed affinity. First, to seek freedom and the right to choices (culturally, politically, and economically) is a priori justification of the local, discontinuous, disqualified, illegitimate knowledge (Foucault 1976). What Said demonstrates in The Question of Palestine (1980), for instance, is to reverse the consensus comprehension of the history of the Palestinians dispossessions and Diaspora and to represent the Palestinians quest for recognition as a colonial situation on the one hand and the urgency to conceive the political process as one of a decolonization instead of a supposed peace process on the other. Second, the question of Palestine for Said is essentially a contest between an affirmation and a denial26

memory (Ashcroft 2001:

The Exchanges Edward Said-Micheal Walzer (Hart 2000:187-199).

35

119). Memory (that of a colonized people) is a moral resistance to the effects of narratives centralizing power deployed in terms of struggles, conflict and war. It is in this perspective that Said encourages the efforts made by the Israeli and Palestinian revisionist historians and claims that the historiographic project (the post-colonial project generally) has just begun. The second function of the critical language is cultural. We need, Said states, a language of appreciation, care and attention that will be a rejection of religious and orthodox values (Bov ed. 2000:71). In other words, to envision alternative models of knowledges and critical inquiries based on what Said names critical humanism. What critical consciousness at bottom [is] if not unstoppable predilection for alternatives (Said 1983: 274). Critical consciousness is imaginative and neither an adversial alternative to power nor a dependent function of it (228). Human begins, critically proceeding, can provide and imagine alternative models of society and future that power and paranoia cannot (Said: Mar 2001). Moral vision and humane democratic values are the

weapons of the oppressed. The criticism as critical consciousness is to cope with the state of moral powerlessness and defeatism on the one hand, and to transform the passive consciousness on the other (Said 1983: 247). Then, it is no coincidence that Said admires figures such as Frantz Fanon and JeanPaul Sartre. Sartre, for instance, has courageous positions on Algerian war of

Independence (1962-1965) and Vietnam War and vehemently advocates popular struggles (e.g. La Cause du Peuple, Les Temps Modernes ).27 Universal intellectuals, musicians and artists such as Yehudi Menuhin and Daniel Barenboim, are, according to Said, inspiring models.28 Barenboim is the co-author of Musical Elaborations (1991) and co-founder of The

27

Although Sartre was a legendary figure for Said: ( [O]ne admired Sartre for the efforts he made to understand situations and when necessary to supply solidarity to political causes, ) he held ambiguous account of Sartre s pro-Zionist stances. See Sartre and the Arabs: Footnote (May 2000). 28 See for instance Said s essays: Barenboim and the Wagner Taboo (Aug 1999) and Music of Men s Lives (Mar 1999).

36

West-Eastern Divan Orchestra. Both of the cited musicians acknowledge the crimes of the Israeli state and espouse the course of coexistence. The role of the intellectual, Said goes further, must be guided by a sort of romantic idealism. From another perspective, in Representations of the Intellectual (1994), Said articulates the idea of an intellectual as an outsider, and exilic. The solitary condition allows the intellectual to grasp more than one vision or one optic. The intellectual exile is also in permanent opposition to the conventional consensus. [E]xile, for Said, is a model for the intellectual who is tempted and even beset and overwhelmed, by the rewards of accommodation, yea-saying, settling in (Said: Jul 1993). We could safely argue, then, that criticism in exile is to think in terms of survival, and rising beyond the national, ideological and ethnic lines as well as the violence and the dehumanization of other peoples experiences. Nationalism and jingoism put solidarity and passion before critical consciousness and saying the truth. What is more interesting, Said says in an interview with Jacqueline Rose, is to look beyond identity. Speaking truth to power is a recurrent theme in Saidian tradition and I will tackle it in relation to Noam Chomsky as a model of the intellectual that inspires Said. Said embodies the model of the intellectual he describes, a trope-cum-figure. It is widely manifested in his life- long cause the Palestinian question. Criticism before solidarity is the guiding

mantra for the intellectual in order to transcend the political tribalism. He took critical positions of the functioning of the Palestinian liberation Organisation (PLO), as well as of Yasser Arafat and his entourage. Said opposed The Oslo Accords and qualified it as the Palestinian Versailles. When discussing the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, Said was

committed to the universal values against the ineptitude of the government of Arafat. It is, Said argues, a corrupt, an incompetent and an autocratic government. Said, constantly

37

questions Arafat leadership,29 the American mediators and Israeli negotiators on matter of accountability and clear political and moral responsibility (Said 2000:3-7). Said relates the peace process to the rectification of the Palestinian Authority. A trenchant criticism voiced against the authoritarian party of Arafat, Fatah, and by the same token, the rival Hamas movement -- a silent majority of the Palestinians is neither for the authority s misplaced trust in Oslo (or for its lawless regime of corruption and repression) nor Hamas s violence (Said: Jan 2002). Said s opposition to the Oslo Declaration of Principles is due to what seems to him as a betrayal of a just and moral cause. The PLO and Arafat turn out to be policing entities in the hands of the occupation forces or enforcer as he puts it. There is a failure to recognize that [o]ur defence against unjust policies is a moral high ground and then promote understanding of that position in Israel and the U.S., something we have never done (Said: Oct 2001). The recognition of the Palestinian rights to exist and their catastrophic plight are the central points for the resistance and the future state. The question of Palestine, Said claims, is a contest between affirmation and denial. The Zionists claims to Palestine are further consolidated by Arafat s regime and greed for power and privilege. It is more constructive, then, to delineate Said s writings on Palestine from anti-colonial and liberating perspectives. Faithful to his secular criticism, Said sees hope in the emerging new secular nationalist current (Al-Mubadara)...with true

independence and popular status (Said: Jan 2002). The tendency of historians, philosophers and intellectuals to abide by restricted political and epistemological lines has its misfortunes, knowing that a political doctrine is misleading to the pursuit of committed intellectual, for it serves power than it does for truth. If you are a humanist, Said says in an interview how can you say that there are universal rights, but only for white people, and not for coloured people, or the lesser people, that they

29

See A People in Need of Leadership (Sep-Oct 2001).

38

are only for Jews, and not for Arabs, only for Catholics and not for Protestants, and viceversa (Said 2007).30 As a case in point, one could think of Said s critical stances on what is referred to as revisionist or post-Zionist historians in Israel. They are supposed to examine the official narratives of the state of Israel. Said shows how erroneous such revisionism is. In New History, Old Ideas (May 1998), Benny Morris, an Israeli historian and critical voice, seems reluctant to acknowledge the evidences he gathered in studying the birth of Israel, according to Said. It is about the wiping out of the map the Palestinians in 1948 and the massacres committed by the Israeli forces. This is what Said calls old ides in doing new history. The lesson here is this: ...a significant change in the main lines of Zionist ideology cannot occur within the hegemony of official politics, but must take place outside that particular context, that is, where intellectuals are more free to ponder and reflect upon the unsettling realities of present day Israel.31

In other words, if Zionism continues to be

unquestioned, the historical study will be systematic, political and uncompromising. Instead, Said suggests a scholarship that is based on humanist principles of common future, survival and coexistence. The real challenge is to think our history [Palestinians and Israelis] together and to acknowledge the other s sufferance .32 The Israelis and the Palestinians are, in Said s estimation, communities of suffering and the only realistic outcome of the present conflict is to live in a binational state. Affiliation (as discussed in section 2, chapter 1) and as Said indicates, is a sophisticated reading of Gramsci (Said 1983:174). Behind this interest lays a conception of truth that resembles Gramsci s: the truth must never be presented in a dogmatic and absolute form as if it was mature and perfect. Truth, because it can spread out, must be adapted to the historical and cultural conditions of the social group in which we want it to spread, Gramsci argues (Jenks 1993:82). The oppositional knowledge that Said describes could be30 31

Said s interview in Postcolonial Text. Ibid. 32 Ibid.

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traced back to Gramsci s philosophy in his most valuable contribution to Marxist theory: the exercise of ideology, hegemony and the urge for an active and resistant cultural politics. Said s analysis of Orientalism as a pattern or regime of truth that is hegemonic sets him in line with the project of defying the cultural consensus not only because hegemony alters our knowledge of the world but also for it creates a new ideological soil and determines a reform of knowledge, a philosophical fact according to Gramsci (Jenks 1993: 83-84). Hegemony for Gramsci is the term used to describe the way in which a dominant class or a group in society makes compromise, forges moral and intellectual (cultural) leadership and establishes the state institutions as well as social relations accepted by the dominated in order to manufacture a consensus. It is the bourgeoisie that acquire and maintain the submission of the dominated classes.33 Hegemony, in brief, is the arrangement of domination. Gramsci questions the functioning of the social and cultural laws that maintain a political system. This in turn feeds into Saidian criticism that disturbs the conventional, the status quo and narrow view of human world. Saidian intellectual might be considered as Gramscian in that he/she is not a mover of passion but actively participating in social matters. The organic intellectual, Said believes is much closer to the reality than anything [Julien] Benda gives us, particularly in the late twentieth century (Hart 2000:119). The organic intellectual, in Gramscian terminology, is an individual fully engaged to the causes of the working classes and who can grasp the ideological manifestations of the class conflict. This figure is generally galvanized by what we refer to as social justice, totally opposed to the state ideology and who plays a key role in defining the cause of the working classes. Said himself could be qualified as an organic intellectual in being a supporter of his own people s cause.

33

Ibid.

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Antonio Gramsci, and drawing from Benedotto Croce s analysis of historicism (History of Europe in the Nineteenth century), commented that philosophical thought must not be conceived as evolution from one style to another but rather as pense de la ralit historique, that is to say as a thought of historical reality (Gramsci 1978:24).

Accordingly, it is for the intellectual to represent the collective suffering, to witness the hardships of peoples and keep their memories. It is also about representing issues and peoples that are suppressed or forgotten. This is what Said names the representation of the intellectual which is the manner in which he defends a cause or an idea in society (Said 2004:6-7). Said, by the same reasoning, views the organic intellectual as autonomous from the power relations or what Gramsci calls hegemony. Organic intellectual is a partisan of a particular cause (Hart 2000: 119). In addition to Gramsci s concept of the organic intellectual, Said relies on Benda s view of the clerks to construe what is contradictory to his Gramscian inspiration of the nature and function of the intellectual. In The Treason of the Clerics or La Trahison des clercs (1928), Benda prefers a religious connotation to describe intellectuals. Clerics realm is above the pandemonium of ordinary life. However, the quest of knowledge and justice, naturally attributed to them, is betrayed. Clerics, Benda says, began to play the game of political passions (Hart 2000: 118). They act on the basis of their collaboration with power in propaganda model rather than out of principles. The equivalents of the clerks are what Chomsky calls the new-mandarins or the secular priesthood (first used by Isaiah Berlin). In the following chapter, I will draw attention to the similarities between Said s and Chomsky s conceptions of the intellectual as speaking truth to power. At bottom, this function is typically Gramscian. What Gramsci offers most compellingly by his critique of the traditional intellectual is, Said says in an interview with Social Thought, to make the truth prevail and to

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understand the way in which we can live together as human beings.

Thus, Said s

oppositional intellectual is both Gramscian and humanist. On Gramsci s view, the intellectual is a universal function outside the professional activity (Jenks 1993: 84). The mode of the intellectual, Gramsci writes, can no longer consist in eloquence, which is an exterior and momentary mover of feeling and passions, but in active participation in practical life, as constructor, organizer, permanent persuader, and not justly simple orator (Jenks 1993: 84). The relationship between the individual and the social world, as we can see, is that of power -- a relationship of opposition. There is an interesting Gramscian tone in that perception. The oppositional intellectual or the organic intellectual is the ideal figure to constantly keep troubling that consensus [collective passions, nationalism, and class interest] and to introduce a kind of critical and political reflection that is too often lost, Said asserts.34

34

See Said s interview with Social Thought.

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2. Edward Said, Noam Chomsky and the Role of the Intellectual

It is the responsibility of the intellectual to speak the truth and to expose lies. Noam Chomsky

The focus of this chapter is on the extraordinary resemblance between two intellectuals who have shaped the humanities in many ways: Edward Said and Noam Chomsky. Known for his professional work on linguistics (particularly his generative grammar) and philosophy as well as his writings on social and political issues, Noam Chomsky advocates a conception of the intellectual and his roles that influenced Said. Both share a distrust of the cult of experts or what Chomsky calls the manufacturing of consent. Said s worldliness brings about recognition of the connection between areas of studies, academic criticism and political affairs. In fact, academic knowledge constitutes a kind of ideological and political rationale for the imperial policy, U.S. mainly. Second, both of them agree on the responsibility of the intellectual to insist upon the truth historical perspective (Chomsky: Feb 1967). To resist the collaborations of the intelligentsia, Chomsky claims, intellectuals must confront the doctrines of state religion (democracy, republican values, national security, and patriotism). The main task is for those who stubbornly seek freedom, there can be no more urgent task than to come to understand the mechanisms and practices of indoctrination (Mc Gilvray ed. 2005: 239). The treason of the intellectuals is what Chomsky and Edward Herman call propaganda model. This concept refers to the control of thought by freedom and consent meticulously manufactured. The consent works more effectively in free societies and rather than setting a single party [a vanguard party] line to be followed, the [and] to see events in their

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institutions of indoctrination set the boundaries of acceptable opinion, setting the terms of discussion Chomsky would add (237). Experts form a new class that operates within the dominant social and political systems. Chomsky points out that they arguably are servants of the power structure (Chomsky: May 2001). As a privileged class, experts, academics and intellectuals, betray their moral responsibilities in tacitly choosing to support the interest of the dominant system and state power. Addressing the same issue, Chomsky declares that[t]hose who actually do have a valid claim to such special competence have a particular obligation to make very clear to the general public the limits of what is understood at any serious level; these limits are typically very narrow in matters of significance in human 35 affairs.

Beyond moral truisms, there is no scientific explanation for thinking that opportunity confers responsibility. Intellectuals have a sort of opportunity, according to Chomsky.

Said likewise, is uneasy about the separation of the academic careers and the social affairs. A tenet he found inexistent in the functioning of the professional and the technical enterprises. The Professionals tend to advance the interest of their governments uncritically but self-consciously. As Said demonstrates in Orientalism, there is a responsibility to transform or unlearn the categories of understanding one s culture and the Other s. And it is through a critique of the experts (Orientalists, for example), that a human perception of culture becomes non-coercive. The discourse of the mainstream journalists and intellectuals feeds into the easy comforts and acceptance of a mass culture attitude. In total opposition, Said prefers a critical position that resists the cultural flow and clich-ridden perceptions of the individual and society at large. Liberal left intellectuals in America, for example, and according to Said, betray their so-called progressivism by tolerating imperial policies of the governments, in addition to the social oppression and the muteness regarding U.S continued support of despotic regimes around the world and Israeli colonialism.

35

Ibid.

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It is the moral bankruptcy of the experts and state functionaries that brings about submission and desolation. Liberal democracies, Said indicates, commit genocide and ethnic cleansing just as pariah states and unpopular regimes. In total opposition, the Saidian intellectual is to resist through memory and universalism.The first duty is to demystify the debased language and images to justify American practices and hypocrisy. There can be resistance without memory and universalism. If ethnic cleansing is evil in Yugoslavia as it is, of course it is evil in Turkey, Palestine, Africa, and elsewhere If war is cruel and deeply wasteful, then it is cruel whether or not American pilots bombing from 30.000 feet and remain unscathed. And if diplomacy is always to be preferred over military means, then diplomacy must be used at all cost. (Said: Jun 1999)

It is a resistance to sordid military and economic policies by advancing his (the intellectual) principles in the public order of things (Hart 2000:118). Thus, in a

Chomskyian twist, Said disagrees with the collegiality and constraints that thrust upon the intellectual. To add, it is the excessive conformity and the management of public opinion that needs to be questioned (Chomsky: Aug 2007). Another issue that relates Said s thought to that of Chomsky s is the function of the intellectual as speaking truth to power.