Edward Said: The Legacy of a Public Intellectual

By Melbourne University Publishing Ltd

This collection is an enterprise of discovery and critical inquiry into the legacy of one of late modernity's greatest public intellectuals, Edward Said.
Noted contributors, including Bill Ashcroft, John Docker, Lisa Lowe, Hsu-ming Teo and Patrick Wolfe, address an array of intellectual, political and cultural issues in their engagement with Said's oeuvre. Exciting new scholarship highlights the ways in which humanities in the twenty-first century can engage with Said's legacy, which includes his imbrications of culture and imperialism, his cosmopolitan critique of the idea of 'clash of civilisations', and his belief that the intellectual needs to maintain 'intellectual performances' on many fronts.
The individual chapters achieve a sense of balance between the two poles of Said's persona: the brilliant and intimidating literary and music critic who invested deeply in an inclusive and democratic vision of humanism and the outspoken public intellectual who kept alive the truth of Palestine and the dangers of a settler colonial ethos.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Mar 25, 2015
• ISBN: 9780522853575

Book preview

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INTRODUCTION

Ned Curthoys and Debjani Ganguly

Edward Said: The Legacy of a Public Intellectual is a volume that reflects on the complex and refractory legacy of Edward Said, a luminous public intellectual, political activist and humanist. It seeks to illuminate Said’s oeuvre as generated by two key aspects of his public persona: a brilliant literary critic and humanist on the one hand and an outspoken public intellectual who kept the truth of Palestine alive on the other. For Said the two roles existed in a continuum rather than in opposition. His vision of humanism drew on an ethos of worldly engagement influenced by political exile and émigré experiences, especially the dispossession of the Palestinian people, and recuperated for the field of literary studies vanishing cultural histories and versions of intellectual struggle embodied in the exilic philological virtuosity of such humanists as Giambattista Vico, Leo Spitzer and Erich Auerbach.

It is an extraordinary testament to the ‘worldliness’ of Said that our volume has crossed many borders in order to rise to the challenge of his textured oeuvre, with contributors assessing his impact on fields such as sociology, political activism, literature, humanism, philology, musicology, settler-colonial history, orientalism and popular culture, Internet and media studies, Judaeo-Arabic history and Zionism. In preparing this volume we have been constantly surprised and delighted by the ways in which Said engages our contributors, who mostly write from a country, Australia, that Said himself never visited.

In this introduction we illuminate the inspirational power of Said’s legacy in an Australian settler-colonial context. We discuss Said’s comparativist ethos and reprisal of humanism and philology as a resonant contribution to theorising the historical imaginary that should inform intellectual work. In the process, we foreshadow how our contributors explore the strengths and shortcomings of Said’s representations of the intellectual in light of his tenacious fidelity to a cultural hierarchy privileging literature and music, a hierarchy that perhaps devalues the iconophilia of media, the Internet and popular cultures. Finally we remark on a little-discussed aspect of Said’s oeuvre: his creation, in the spirit of Deleuze and Arendt, of ‘conceptual personae’ (Vico, Auerbach, Adorno), those ambiguous figures of thought whose life and idiosyncrasies stimulate a worldly and spatial critical consciousness suspicious of reified abstractions.

Said once lamented to the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram that the USA has not been able to figure the genocide of Native American peoples and the enormous fact of slavery into a national consensus; as a republican imperium, the USA refuses to fold colonial injustice and indigenous ownership into its historical consciousness and political imaginary. Said rued his adopted country’s abnegation of Vico’s depiction of historical time as cyclical and recursive, whereby periods of cultural creativity and civic constitution are succeeded by barbaric destruction and the banal repetition of folly. As a Palestinian, Said was keenly aware that his own people had been effectively erased by settler-colonial consciousness in the USA, that Euro-Americans identified with the Zionist Sabra or ‘new Jew’ whose Adamic potential to colonise virgin lands at the expense of an indigenous people mirrored the USA’s own manifest destiny and structuring optimism. Acutely aware of the continuing power of ‘terra nullius’ as a dominant settler-colonial imagining of Australia as functionally uninhabited—uncultivated and without governance—Australian-based and diasporic Australian scholars respond vigorously to Said’s creative historicity and affiliations to decolonising struggles as a political catalyst and comparative context for historical, literary and cultural analysis. This is an acute issue in Australia, in which the power of colonial invasion, nationalist amnesia and continuing indigenous dispossession is contested by postcolonial visions and decolonising critical energies.

The eagerness with which our contributors took up the challenge to assess the significance of Said’s influential contributions to the ethics of public intellectual life and the worldliness of criticism suggests the potency of historical consciousness in Australian public culture. Our contributors intervene in efforts by a relatively recent settler-colony to think the constitutive violence of its own founding; they are mindful of the emergence of strong indigenous voices in Australian academe and the resounding impact of multiculturalism and postcolonial criticism on intellectual life in Australia. If, as Said once mused, the burden of history weighs far too lightly on the shoulders of many institutionally ensconced academics, the contributors to Edward Said: The Legacy of a Public Intellectual respond sympathetically to Said’s evocative coordination of humanist interpretive practice and a sometimes tragic, but always enabling and disseminating, historical consciousness of colonial dispossession, imperialism and decolonising resistance movements. Our contributors respond energetically to Said’s visionary depiction of a dynamic historical sensibility as one of the ‘changing bases of humanistic study and practice’ as enunciated in his late work Humanism and Democratic Criticism: ‘[Said’s version of humanistic practice] sees history, even the past itself, as still unresolved, still being made, still open to the presence and the challenges of the emergent, the insurgent, the unrequited, and the unexplored.’¹ Said’s humanism was a challenge to youth and innovation: ‘It is true to say that the new generation of humanist scholars is more attuned than any before it to the non-European, genderized, decolonized, and decentered energies and currents of our time.’²

Said’s critique of privative and exclusive versions of humanism has an ethical affiliation to a sentient Erasmian blend of porous acculturation, rhetorical exuberance and sensitivity to paradox. Said remained loyal to the vision of the early eighteenth-century humanist and historicist Giambattista Vico. Vico’s pluralist recuperation of diverse histories and life worlds was evoked in a lively, inquisitive and sociable genre of philological commentary. The humanist, Said writes, is ‘always restlessly self-clarifying’, and the self-education their work adumbrates involves ‘widening circles of awareness’ that allows the contemporary humanist to ‘cultivate [a sense of] multiple worlds and complex interacting traditions’. Far from engaging in an aggressive politics of identity buttressed by essentialist narratives, Said’s Benjaminian desire to redeem those victimised by the ‘storm of progress’ continues to confront the constitution of bounded communities and exclusive histories by instrumentalist historicisms and nationalist imaginaries. Our contributors respond to this pluralising, open-ended historical sense with their own supple explorations of the relationship between intellectual praxis and historical memory.

Comparative settler-colonialisms

Our book is written in a now-time of historical crisis, in which comparativism challenges received histories. In many of the contributions an acute perception of settler-colonialism forms a context of relationality across cognitive and disciplinary boundaries. In ‘Palestine, Project Europe and the (un-)making of the new Jew’, Patrick Wolfe registers his disappointment with Maxime Rodinson’s dated Eurocentric description of Zionism’s provenance in his germinal Israel: A Colonial-Settler State? A transnational comparativist, Wolfe is disappointed with Rodinson’s inattention to the specificity of settler-colonialism: ‘I would like a general account of settler-colonialism to be able to include relationships such as those between Chinese and Tibetans, Tswana and Khoi-San, Russians and Chechens, or Indonesians and Papuans. It should also be able to accommodate settler-colonialisms that are internal to Europe, such as those imposed on the Irish, Basque or Sami peoples.’

Wolfe makes the point that Palestinian rights do not depend on whether ideas of transfer and expulsion originated in nineteenth-century Europe; this ‘quagmire’ of voluntarism is best avoided in favour of an ‘approach that relates historical outcomes to the practical logic of the human activities that produce them’. Settler-colonialism cannot be reduced to the logic of an event or the ideality of a home-grown enterprise. It is a labile structure of invasion and elimination, sometimes calculated, sometimes opportunistic. It calls for a relational interpretation mindful of the suffering of indigenous victims and the ongoing genocidal relation of coloniser and colonised, a relation palpable today in occupied Palestine. Cross-cultural work on settler-colonialism challenges the self-sufficiency of any history of ideas, enabling Wolfe’s brilliant insight that ‘ideas do not have lives of their own. They are born, reproduced, discarded and transformed in and through human activity.’

In his chapter ‘Interacting imaginaries in Israel and the United States’, Lorenzo Veracini ponders an incipient and staunchly resisted reconfiguration of Israel in the popular imaginary as an apartheid state, remembering that black South Africans had ultimately received the support of US public opinion because their struggle was capable of affecting ‘the imaginations and dreams of the entire world’. Palestinians too need to activate civil rights images and agendas. Yet perceptions of Israel in the USA as less a particular nation state than an ‘isopolitical’ imaginary can be ascribed to ‘shared settler-colonial narrative regimes’ predicated on a sense of an Elect people free to enact their exalted destiny in a chosen land that is only contingently and superficially inhabited by an indigenous people. Veracini remarks that if it was ‘God’s American Israel’ that was founded by Puritans on Massachusetts Bay, it is God’s Israeli America that a specific constituency is seeing founded on the hilltops of the West Bank. By honestly facing up to the intersections and entanglements of Israeli and US colonial traditions and imaginative investments, perhaps a once strong and still surviving anti-colonial and anti-racist rhetorical and narrative tradition in the USA can be mobilised. For Veracini and Wolfe, analysing the interaction of settler imaginaries can help articulate resistant perspectives to the plethora of mystifying cliché that dominates discussion of Israel/Palestine, shaping different affective possibilities and visions of coexistence.

Brigid Rooney analyses the esteemed poet and activist Judith Wright in the context of Said’s later, inclusive representation of the intellectual as a writer who has a special duty to address the constituted and authorised powers of one’s own society. How did Australia’s once poet laureate and national bard recast herself as a permanently ‘amateur’ and unhoused writer-activist, dissident towards the parochialism of the settler nation and with multiple affiliations with environmental activism, Aboriginal struggle and transnational literary networks? Contrary to the tendency of the poet to seek honours and state largesse, Wright was so angry at the nationalism of the 1988 Australian Bicentenary of white founding that she refused further anthologisation of one of her early poems, ‘Bullocky’, issuing thereby a public challenge to the ‘complacency of white Australians’. Wright, in uncompromising mood, later derided this much-loved romantic nationalist poem as ‘hyperbolic’ and ‘obviously bad’. In Rooney’s hands Wright emerges as an ornery and vitally engaged writer-intellectual whose commitment to the openness of the past and disdain for mythologisation was responsive to Said’s call in Humanism and Democratic Criticism for the intellectual to perform on many fronts, keeping in play the sense of opposition and engaged interpretation, always discerning the possibilities for active intervention.

One of Said’s most eminent interlocutors and adapters is the Iraqi–Jewish Israeli postcolonial critic Ella Shohat, whose recent collection of essays Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices (2006) brilliantly inflects Said’s concern to work ‘along the seam lines of theoretical frameworks’ and to historicise in such a way that one thinks in terms of a ‘dialogical relation within, between, and among cultures, ethnicities, and nations’.³ Shohat evokes a Said whose ‘relational’ and worldly energies and insistence on the importance of intellectual work’s historical location and political imbrications exist uneasily alongside the theoretical aura of the ‘postcolonial’, whose disciplinary privilege in the USA, Shohat warns, is often divorced from US racial politics and its militant struggles, and continues to be benignly aloof from the global ‘implicatedness of the US’ in the present.

In his chapter ‘Exile and representation: Edward Said as public intellectual’, Bill Ashcroft, unlike Shohat, appears less concerned with this tension between the theoretical Said as the locus of canonical postcolonialism with its emphasis on the power of discourse and representation and the worldly Said who located himself at the heart of Palestinian history with its deadly agonism of exile and dispossession. For Ashcroft the two are inseparable, and the wars of history are wars of representation. Disciplinary postcolonialism and its ethical imperative of speaking truth to power through ‘counter-representation’ is judged by Ashcroft to have as much relevance as ever in this era of neoliberal capitalism’s conflict with alternative imaginaries. As he says, ‘the extraordinarily simplistic images by which Islam and Palestine are covered in the media—beards, veils, bombs and wild-eyed craziness—are a model for the hegemony of signs in the new empire. The principle Said [espouses] is the idea (or hope) that hegemony can be countered by a form of counter-representation.’

Extra-territorial philological humanisms

Our contributors respond vibrantly to Shohat’s challenge to resist decontextualised deployments of postcolonial theory. Shohat finds in Said’s oeuvre the desire to discern other historical cartographies and ‘relational maps of knowledge’, in which theories, actions and forms of struggle can be translated across contexts rather than referred to normative Western paradigms. A pertinent example is Said’s inflection of an extra-territorial philology that reaches across time, encompassing a generation of German–Jewish émigré philologists, such as Erich Auerbach and Leo Spitzer, born in the late nineteenth century, whose ‘extra-territorial’ attention to language and culture constituted an ethic of hospitality and communicative immediacy towards other cultures that revived the dream of Goethe’s Weltliteratur. Said’s adumbration of philology also reaches back towards those systems of humanistic education and Islamic interpretation of the Koran that enriched southern Europe and North Africa in the twelfth century. As discussed later in the volume, Said recalls the cross-cultural heritage of philology in order to decouple the term ‘fundamentalist’ from ‘Arab’. He restores ‘al-qaeda’ to its philological function as the word for grammar or base of language, while jihad is reclaimed for ‘secular’ usage, contextualised as a commitment to hermeneutical community that might be combined with a component of extraordinary commitment and personal effort in interpretation; that is, itjihad.⁴

We suggest that ‘Saidian philology’ reflects a Benjaminian politics of memory as translatio across contexts, an attempt to disrupt the identification of language with a people or nation, to deontologise language study and pluralise critical consciousness beyond the limitations of a more recently constituted, nation-centric, linguistically demarcated idea of ‘English’ or literary studies. Saidian philology inhabits Benjamin’s ‘now-time’ (Jetz-Zeit) of the historical imagination in which the past illuminates the present at a ‘moment of danger’. In this case the normativity of Zionism and Israel to the Jewish community is put in question as a generation of non-Zionist and cosmopolitan diaspora Jews (Auerbach, Spitzer, Victor Klemperer, Benjamin) are evoked in their cultural pluralism and heterogeneous comparativism, their disdain for Zionist romantic nationalism and their openness to heterodox versions of the past. Proponents of fundamentalist versions of Islam are reminded of a syncretic Andalusian cultural heritage in which Arabic was the quotidian and philosophical language of both Arab and Jew, and individual interpretation and creative commitment were not inimical to the Islamic faith.

In his chapter ‘Edward Said’s unhoused philological humanism: Vico, Spitzer, Auerbach’, Ned Curthoys discusses Said’s desire to rehabilitate philology as a critical praxis of exile, enabling Said to offer a history of the ‘dramatic and unstable’ conditions under which humanist criticism has been produced, in so doing underscoring the achievements of particular personalities living in a critical, unresolved relationship with their homeland and cultural inheritance. Curthoys discusses Said’s reprisal of Auerbach’s concept of Ansatzpunkt or a critical point of departure, suggesting an intellectual initiative that is passionate about intervening in the present by asking resounding questions of the past, sustained by active and individual research that is not limited to one field of specialisation.

Debjani Ganguly, in her chapter on Said’s legacy in the field of global comparativism and world literature, uses our present post-Cold War era as a critical point of departure. From this vantage point she assesses the relevance of Saidian philological and comparative humanism, especially as articulated in his posthumously published Humanism and Democratic Criticism, a work that expressly takes up the challenge of rethinking the world humanistically since the fall of the Berlin Wall and 9/11. She notes the value of Said’s extrapolation of literary and philological comparativism to a broader, interdisciplinary framework of humanistic scholarship in our age of enhanced world connectivity and conflict. But she also highlights the limits of such extrapolation as seen in Said’s reluctance to critically comment on visual and electronically mediated modes of cultural production in our digital age. The literary and cultural comparativist of the twenty-first century can scarcely afford to be oblivious of the aesthetics and related humanist ethics of this iconophilic age. To that extent, Ganguly argues, Said’s vision of a philological humanism for the post-9/11 world, with its high modernist ‘literary’ and ‘musical’ touchstones, might be somewhat out of joint with the times. But it is also precisely this untimeliness of the ‘late’ Said that has merit in other respects. In tracing the conjuncture of several ‘world’ models of literary and cultural analysis in this Jetz-Zeit of global crises, Ganguly signals the singular importance of Humanism and Democratic Criticism in articulating a vision of humanism for the new millennium that is consciously at odds with dominant political and economic registers of the ‘global’. Said’s extra-territorial, comparativist, intercultural, translational and philological approach to global difference and interconnectivity cuts through the belligerent political dichotomies of global capital: Huntington’s ‘clash of civilisations’ thesis, Barber’s Jihad versus McWorld or Al Qaeda’s the Muslim ummah and the infidel West. Such false dichotomies, coded with notions of incompatibility and non-comparability, have become palpable handmaidens of terror and warfare in our age. Said’s generous humanism is indeed a salutary ‘worldly’ intervention.

A deeper historical provenance to Said’s notion of ‘worldliness’ is accorded by Lisa Lowe in her chapter, ‘The worldliness of intimacies’. Revisiting the emergence of liberal philosophy, and especially the notions of human freedom, bourgeois individuality, and interiority and intimacy in the West, she is at pains to give these abstractions a ‘world’ by embedding them in a narrative of African slavery and Asian indentured labour in the colonised Americas. In doing so, she expressly admits her indebtedness to Said: ‘In an inversion of the presumed universality of metropolitan culture and the particularity of colonies, Said commented that worldliness … was a vast ocean of human effort in which official culture exists like an archipelago. In this tribute to Said, I treat the liberal narrative of European freedom as an archipelago within the vast human efforts of African slavery and Asian indenture in the European colonized, new world of the Americas.’

Invoking Said allows Lowe to meticulously trace transcontinental interdependencies between Europe, Africa, Asia and the Americas in colonial economies of slavery and indenture. More specifically, through a detailed reading of colonial archives, Lowe excavates a conception of ‘worldly intimacy’ that is juxtaposed with the abstracted colonial bourgeois sense of privacy and domesticity. This is the ‘intimacy’ of interracial adjacency through forced transportation of African and Asian labour to the Americas, of rape, domestic servitude and concubinage, and finally of coexistence and contact among ‘slaves, indentured and mixed free peoples living together’. This spectrum of worldly intimacies finds no place in the Hegelian analysis that conceptualised ‘intimacy’ as the property of the bourgeois individual (man) within the confines of his domesticity in civil society. Lowe’s analysis of the occlusions and remainders of liberal humanist philosophy, its ‘coeval violence of affirmation and forgetting’, as she puts it, and her retrieval of its past conditional temporality—’what could have been’—is a powerful testament to the legacy of Edward Said’s intellectual labour on behalf of those disenfranchised by colonial and neocolonial modernities.

Representations of the intellectual

A major part of this volume investigates the ongoing significance of Said’s sometimes idealistic representations of the brave, independent and refractory intellectual who is often depicted as enabled and protected by the autonomous quasi-utopian space of the university. Sean Scalmer’s chapter ‘Edward Said and the sociology of intellectuals’ asks how Said’s representations of the intellectual can offer a fuller picture of contemporary intellectual activity and challenges to that activity. How do notions of representation, amateurism, affiliation and speaking the truth to power enable a sociology of intellectual labour? Scalmer notes that for Said the obligation of the intellectual to ‘represent’, without simply identifying with a constituency, transcends the limitations of a functional professional life and the always marginal position of the ‘critic’; Said’s own troubled and shifting affiliations with the Palestinian movement enriched his theoretical excursions on this important and problematic topic. Yet Scalmer too is restless with Said’s university-centred portrait of the intellectual; what of movement activists and their representative function? Are they intellectuals? Is there an ‘activist wisdom’ that does not need to be mediated by an elite aesthetic sensibility? Contemporary representation is assayed and truth sought in the fields of journalism, politics and the culture industries of cinema and music. Do Said’s elite musical passions perhaps leave aside the mission of the hip-hop lyricist to represent, and the folk-troubadour to challenge, the seats of the powerful?

Saree Makdisi aptly envisages these problematics of the Saidian public intellectual persona as a question of ‘style’. In his chapter, ‘Edward Said and the style of the public intellectual’, he raises the pertinent question of whether Said’s high modernist invocation of the ‘amateur’ intellectual fiercely at odds with institutions of power and embodying a unique personal aesthetic, a signature ‘style’ as a romantic, charismatic genius, is actually suited to our digitised, decentred, post-individualistic and democratised age. ‘Style’ in the modernist sense could not be disembedded from the substance of the creative, political or intellectual interventions of a Genet, a Picasso or an Adorno. But in the image-imbued information age of late capitalist global modernity, it is precisely ‘style’ that is in danger of being commodified as a detachable ‘image’ and free-floating signifier. Said’s confidence in a high modernist confluence of the aesthetics and politics of intellectual/creative labour, Makdisi argues, is ill at ease with our postmodern, late capitalist age. In analysing the question of ‘style’ in the context of intellectual work, Makdisi also interestingly signals a contradiction that lies at the heart of Said’s notion of the intellectual: on one hand Said hoists the figure of a solitary demiurge with a contradictory, alienated relationship with established orders of society and polity; on the other he urges intellectual labour to be accessible, open and ‘public’ in the broadest democratic sense of the term.

The tensions generated by this contradiction also inform Gerard Goggin’s ‘Blogging Said: Public intellectuals in the Internet age’. Goggin’s analysis oscillates between the Said who inspires a diversified conception of intellectual intervention and the Said whose imaginative lacunae and disconnection with the decentred, democratic spaces of our information age trouble and disturb. How, Goggin asks, does Said’s work enable reflection on the Internet’s central role in contemporary public intellectual practice? Certainly Said took pleasure in the rapid dissemination of his own writings into multiple cyber publics and suggested that the Internet forces us to modify our post-Foucauldian ideas of discourse and archive; his pleasure in media democratisation resonates with the new ‘commons’ that the Internet represents, with its ideas of cooperative practice, sharing and gift economy. Said’s dynamic notion of intellectual performances of representation on many fronts and of the creative intellectual as ‘lookout’ for possibilities of public intervention resonates with the casual, quixotic reportage of a blog. Goggin worries, on the other hand, that Said’s model of the heroic intellectual remains silent on how new technology constitutes new social relations, and what concepts and tools we might need to grasp this.

Said and the question of culture

Our contributors also wish to reflect on and question the cultural hierarchies that permeate Said’s aesthetic preferences, such as his confession that popular music, including the Palestinian and Arabic music he grew up with, meant nothing to him, as well as Said’s inattention to popular genres. For example does Said’s preference for classical music endanger his extraordinary and creative attempts to deploy musical terminology, such as the ‘contrapuntal’, for the purposes of critical praxis?

Hsu-Ming Teo’s chapter ‘Orientalism and mass market romance novels in the twentieth century’ is critical of Said’s construction of orientalism as a masculine enterprise. Hsu-Ming rehabilitates an ambiguous history of Western female travel in and representations of the Orient, representations that give impetus to discourses that demonise the patriarchal Orient to further a Western feminist project, but that might also deploy the Middle East as a mise en scène for a romantic chronotope of social exploration and the cross-cultural agonism of lifeworlds and ideas. Hsu-Ming’s attention to the female-authored ‘sheik’ romance genre questions Said’s author-centred depiction of the high modernist ‘Orienteur’ as necessarily male; Said exampled writers such as Flaubert and Nerval whose ‘eccentricity and style of individual consciousness’ could alone be sympathetically juxtaposed to the ideological agenda of academic and scientific modes of orientalism.⁵ Hsu-ming counterposes a reading of contemporary orientalisms that is attentive to the fluidity and self-reflexivity of popular culture.

Ben Etherington’s chapter ‘Said, Grainger, and the ethics of polyphony’ grapples with Said’s fascinating, perplexing and suggestive attempts to imbue literary and cultural criticism with a lexicon and interpretive impulse derived from music, usually the classical music of Bach, Beethoven and Glenn Gould. Etherington reads the growing presence of music in Said’s work as an ‘idealistic aperture’, a move beyond the ethical ambivalences and textual labyrinths that Said identified in Foucauldian discourse analysis and deconstruction. Counterpoint and contrapuntal analysis forge a receptive ethic less interested in the composer’s authority over the material that in non-developmental musical techniques of repetition, variation and elaboration. Etherington traces Said’s theorisation of contrapuntal analysis as formative for Culture and Imperialism in which an ‘exfoliating’ structure of variations enables the contestation of Conrad’s chthonic Africa by African rewriting and the ‘journeying into’ metropolitan space by African authors. In comparing Said’s contrapuntal ethics to the complex and disturbing polyphonic vision of the Australian-born composer Percy Grainger, Etherington worries that Said’s insistence on a ‘developed’ aesthetic sense projects a bourgeois subject and a less than democratic humanism.

Said’s Adorno-like suspicion of popular musical forms and his investment in the modernist notion of music (primarily in its Western classical manifestation) as the ‘most specialized of aesthetics’ are also discussed by Peter Tregear in his chapter, ‘Edward Said and Theodor Adorno: The musician as public intellectual’. Tregear, however, is at pains to distinguish Said from Adorno by noting the former’s emphasis on the performative dimension of music as a space for critical intervention. Adorno abjured the space of performance and accorded supreme value only to the composer as auteur and the composition as legitimate aesthetic object. Said on the contrary emphasised the importance of the space of musical performance as interpretive, critical and oriented towards the social. In his view performance brought to life the protean, mobile, multiply nuanced, even capricious nature of music. It prevented music from being marked as the particular preserve of one or other culture; or, as he told the Jewish conductor Daniel Barenboim, his collaborator on an Arab–Israeli orchestral initiative, performances have an extra-territorial dimension: ‘they help put identity to one side in order to explore the other’. Said’s own predilection for Western classical music, after all, could hardly be attributed to his cultural inheritance as a Christian Arab growing up in Jerusalem and Egypt. It was a case of putting his identity to one side.

The one outstanding manifestation of Said’s belief in the critical, transgressive and extra-territorial power of musical performance was his establishment of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra with Barenboim. The orchestra was made up of young musicians from Israel and the Arab world and was set up in 1999 to commemorate the 250th anniversary of Goethe’s birth in Weimar. The name itself was derived from Goethe’s Westöstlicher Diwan, a collection of poems inspired by the fourteenth century Persian poet Hafiz. As a transcultural and transhistorical enterprise, the West-Eastern Diwan Orchestra is vintage Said, as much a contrapuntal intervention in the domain of Western classical music as a mode of thinking and performing comparatively, expansively, non-coercively.

Conceptual personae

It is perhaps not too wayward, given what Emily Apter has felicitously described as the ‘shock value’ of Said’s critical practice of unusual cultural comparison and surprising juxtaposition—Jewish and Arabic philology, his own exile relayed to that of Erich Auerbach, the sudden disinterment of the classical rhetorical term inventio with its Sophistic inheritance, the claim to be the last wandering Jew—to discern in Said’s recursive attention to the life story of certain favoured intellectuals (Vico, Auerbach, Adorno) the development of what Deleuze and Guattari have termed ‘conceptual personae’. Such conceptual personae as Plato’s Socrates or Dostoevsky’s Idiot, write Deleuze and Guattari, ask the question of thought’s relationship to the earth and the formation of territories, and their existence is as much allegorical as empirical: ‘If we say that a conceptual persona stammers, it is no longer a type who stammers in a particular language but a thinker who makes the whole of language stammer: the interesting question then is What is this thought that can only stammer? ’⁶

Conceptual personae constitute modes of existence and points of view that are not amenable to abstraction and deterritorialisation. They remind us that thought can have antipathetic inspiration and contradictory animation; Socrates never managed to ultimately distinguish himself from his rival Sophists; Vico’s philological inquiries were enraptured by late Renaissance humanist sympathies other than the antiquarian; Hannah Arendt’s Rosa Luxemburg in Men in Dark Times draws on the humane and worldly milieu of her formative years to challenge and adapt the rigidity of Marxist–Leninist theory. Conceptual personae signify immanent movements across doxographies and cultures; they are not leaders, teachers of schools, founders of orthodoxies. Said’s exquisite portrayal of exile constructs conceptual personae who can have sympathetic relays and highly charged disagreements across time and space.

In ‘The question of Europe: Said and Derrida’, John Docker initiates a thought experiment, a confrontation between two eminent conceptual personae, Edward Said and Jacques Derrida, discussing the thinkers in the spirit of Arendt’s Men in Dark Times, in terms of biography, sensibility and anecdote. The relationship to disciplinarity is telling: Said was trained as a literary critic who wished to be interdisciplinary and worldly in his wide-ranging interests. Derrida was close to Euro-American literary critics like de Man and remained lifelong a self-identified philosopher. Docker wants to consider the two personae as traversed by various doxographies; what was their relationship to carnivalesque and popular culture? The power and history of religion? What of questions of Zionism and Israel, critical to both intellectuals who were both largely based in the world’s most pro-Zionist society, the United States of America? What do we make of Derrida’s uneasy relationship to his Algerian origins, and what of his claim that he could bear nothing but a pure, classical French? Was Derrida Said’s historical betrayer?

Several chapters extend and question Said’s recursive deployment of conceptual personae and the life circumstances and changing predilections they traverse. Peter Tregear explores parallels and differences between Edward Said and Theodor Adorno’s exile and critical trajectories. Both were significant musicians in their own right, born into comparatively wealthy families and social worlds that had effectively dissolved by their early teenage years. Exile and alienation catalysed distrust for the ‘rationality of the real’ and encouraged shared scepticism towards simple, neat narratives in politics and culture. Yet while Adorno was Eurocentric and prone to totalising theoretical gestures, Said used his own position as an outsider to the Western tradition to reject theoretical totalising and to impress the labile and dynamic cross-cultural potential of musical performance. Where Adorno’s unrelenting critique became parasitic on the degenerate situation it attacked, Said’s ‘worldly’ energies and alertness to the confluent streams of human historical activity contributed to an adversarial and transformative political commitment.

Ned Curthoys illuminates the productive, unresolved antinomies in Said’s persona of the philological, historicist intellectual whose articulations are of ‘aesthetic and historic power’ and who combine critical rigor and imaginative synthesis. Said’s desideratum is for performative or self-dramatising intellectuals who reveal something of the world-historical forces in which they are enmeshed and who, at least in the case of Auerbach, both affirm and complicate the principles of Western literary performance ‘in the very act of doing them’. As cathected to particular, restless personalities, and to the confessional register of their writings, philology is both an affirmation and corrosive questioning of intellectual traditions and literary histories. In praising migration as a means by which the humanist reckons with different audiences and discovers new intellectual pathways, producing an ‘inner activity’ that compensates for the external distress of displacement, the ever-surprising Leo Spitzer critiqued those of his fellow scholars who refused to relate their intellectual practice to their life worlds and political situations, content merely to live in the ‘paradise of [their] ideas, whether this be accessible to [their] fellow men or not’.

Discussing Said’s work through the prism of conceptual personae proliferates challenging questions about Said’s legacy; for example, does Frantz Fanon, the anti-colonial hero of Culture and Imperialism, emerge as a many-sided persona in Said’s work? Does Said’s relative silence about Fanon’s biographical trajectory from Martinique to Algeria, and thus from the autobiographical writing of Black Skin, White Masks to the more ideologically honed and dogmatic pronunciations of The Wretched of the Earth, obscure the ever-present possibility that the stateless exile might also become zealous convert and self-styled Mosaic prophet of a fallen people? Were not Fanon’s normative nationalist prescriptions of FLN-sponsored anticolonial violence challenged inside and outside Algeria? Is Said’s Fanon less a complex and stratified persona than teleological prophet and teacher of anti-colonial orthodoxy?

In sum, our book has sought both to illuminate and to interrogate Said’s multifarious intellectual and political legacy. In the spirit of Said’s own resistance to finite, reconciling, harmonising models of knowledge-making, the volume opens up ‘Said’ as conceptual persona to myriad, often unreconciled worldly interpretations that give body to his own experience of himself as ‘a cluster of flowing currents’ that are ‘ off and may be out of place’, but that are ‘always in motion, in time, in place … [in] all kinds of strange combinations moving about, not necessary forward, sometimes against each other, contrapuntally yet without one central theme’.⁷

Notes

¹   Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism, p. 26.

²   Ibid., p. 27.

³   Shohat, Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices, p. xvi.

⁴   See also Apter, ‘Theorizing Francophonie’ and ‘Saidian humanism’.

⁵   Said, Orientalism, p. 158.

⁶   Deleuze & Guattari, What is Philosophy? pp. 61–85.

⁷   Said, Out of Place, p. 295.

Bibliography

Apter, Emily, ‘Saidian humanism’, Boundary 2, vol. 31, no. 2, 2004, pp. 35–53.

——‘Theorizing Francophonie’, Comparative Literature Studies, vol. 42, no. 4, 2005.

Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Félix, What is Philosophy? (trans. Graham Burchell & Hugh Tomlinson), Verso, London, 1994.

Said, Edward W., Humanism and Democratic Criticism, Columbia University Press, New York, 2004.

——Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (first published 1978), Penguin Books, London, 2003.

——Out of Place: A Memoir, Viking, Penguin, New Delhi, 1999.

Shohat, Ella, Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices, Duke University Press,

Durham, NC, and London, 2006.

Representing public intellectuals

1

Edward Said and the style of the public intellectual

Saree Makdisi

One of the primary concerns of Edward Said’s work is the extent to which intellectuals are, in one way or another, directly involved in the manufacture of worldly realities, or essentially—to borrow a phrase from Shelley—the real unacknowledged legislators of the world. The main argument of Said’s best known book, after all, is that abstractions like ‘the West’ and ‘the East’ must be actively invented by scholars, artists, poets and historians, and then gradually modified, adjusted, reinvented over time. According to Said, then, scholars and writers, and intellectuals in general, far from being merely the dispassionate detached observers they so often pretend to be, are complicit in the production of the very worldly realities that they claim merely to be faithfully representing. While such a proposition makes it difficult, or impossible, to locate a single objective standpoint from which to accumulate knowledge and evaluate the truth, it also pushes us to consider the extent to which particular intellectuals are involved in either helping to maintain and extend various state policies—of conquest, brutalisation, military occupation, injustice—or helping to contest them, and hence participating in the struggle to create an alternative world of freedom, equality and justice.

Clearly, Said himself not only believed in but also actively demonstrated the ways in which an intellectual can play such an oppositional role. And in his book Representations of the Intellectual he elaborates the ways in which the intellectual ought to fashion him-or herself to play such a role.¹ His understanding of the intellectual involves something of a synthesis of the positions of Antonio Gramsci and Julien Benda, whom he discusses