Edward Said

The Legacy of a Public Intellectual

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• Publisher: MUP Academic Digital
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780522853575
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Anthropologie culturelle et sociale

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.

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 in the opening pages of the book. From Gramsci, Said accepts the notion that intellectuals compose a large and variegated social body, connected to classes, movements and traditions and fulfilling all kinds of social roles, including the production and reproduction of official ideologies and worldviews. But at the same time he finds deeply compelling Benda’s much more restricted notion of the intellectual as a member of a small, embattled, morally driven group speaking out against prevailing opinions regardless of the consequences to themselves. Most intellectuals, according to Said, perform the social role ascribed to them by Gramsci; only a tiny minority are able and willing to elevate themselves to the heights prescribed for them by Benda, to become, in Said’s words, one of those beings ‘set apart, someone able to speak the truth to power, a crusty, eloquent, fantastically courageous and angry individual for whom no worldly power is too big and imposing to be criticized and pointedly taken to task’.²

What I want to question in this chapter is whether Said’s radicalised version of the Bendaian intellectual, compelling and inspiring as it is, is as applicable to our own time as it so clearly was to the intellectuals of a previous age—the one in which Said received his own formation and formed himself in turn. For a number of reasons, as this chapter will try to explain, such intellectuals may no longer exist, or at least they may no longer exist in the way Said described them. And while we may still derive inspiration from Said’s vision of the embattled intellectual, it may no longer be possible to model ourselves precisely along the lines that he prescribed.

There is, of course, no question that it remains possible for someone occupying what Gramsci considered the conventional social role of the intellectual—a teacher, a writer, an artist—to develop ways in which to critically consider, even to contest, social and political power, including the very power that endowed the intellectual with his or her sense of place and privilege in the first place. Such a public intellectual—one willing to speak up, to challenge prevailing social, cultural and political norms and conventional wisdoms of all sorts— is, according to Said, ‘an individual with a faculty for representing, embodying, articulating a message, a view, an attitude, philosophy or opinion to, as well as for, a public’. This role, he continues, ‘has an edge to it, and cannot be played without a sense of being someone whose place it is publicly to raise embarrassing questions, to confront orthodoxy and dogma (rather than to produce them), to be someone who cannot easily be co-opted by governments or corporations, and whose raison d’être is to represent all those people and issues that are routinely forgotten or swept under the rug.’³ Said acknowledges, of course, that such an intellectual, while taking the side of the weak and downtrodden against enormously powerful social and political forces, is hardly free from social constraints himself or herself.

But while Said points out that it is difficult, if not altogether impossible, to speak today of a genuinely independent, autonomous intellectual, one not beholden to or constrained by various social institutions (universities, publishers, media outlets), he insists that the prime threat facing intellectual freedom of expression today comes not from these external forces but rather from a much more insidious pressure: the seduction offered by silence and compromise, or in other words what he distinguishes as the dark side of professionalism, ‘thinking of your work as an intellectual as something you do for a living, between the hours of nine and five with one eye on the clock, and another cocked at what is considered to be proper, professional behavior—not rocking the boat, not straying outside the accepted paradigms or limits, making yourself marketable and above all presentable, hence uncontroversial and unpolitical and “objective” ‘.⁴ Said is neither romantic nor naïve about the pressures of specialisation and professionalisation and the whole cult of expertise, but he argues that ultimately the most effective way to resist these pressures is to insist on also—over and above one’s work as a professional—retaining a certain degree of amateurism.

What Said distinguishes as amateurism, however, involves only in part the capacity to allow one’s work as a critical intellectual to be driven by care and affection rather than profit or specialisation. For, as opposed to specialisation, Said’s version of amateurism also involves a wilful transgression of institutional lines, which he identifies as interference, a ‘crossing of borders and obstacles, a determined attempt to generalize exactly at those points where generalizations seem impossible to make. One of the first interferences to be ventured’, Said adds, ‘is a crossing from literature, which is supposed to be subjective and powerless, into those exactly parallel realms, now covered by journalism and the production of information, that employ representation but are supposed to be objective and powerful.’⁵

Here I am quoting not from the book on intellectuals but rather from a piece that I believe was Said’s first sustained elaboration of the role of the public intellectual, namely, the essay entitled ‘Opponents, audiences, constituencies and community’, which he originally published in 1982.

It is my conviction [he writes in that essay] that culture works very effectively to make invisible and even ’impossible’ the actual affiliations that exist between the world of ideas and scholarship, on the one hand, and the world of brute politics, corporate and state power, and military force, on the other. The cult of expertise and professionalism, for example, has so restricted our scope of vision that a positive (as opposed to an implicit or passive) doctrine of non-interference among fields has set in.⁶

The problem here is not just that matters of public policy are left to so-called ‘experts’ and ‘insiders’ who are close to power, but also that academic professionals who insist on their own hyper-specialisation end up folding in on themselves, confining themselves and their work to an increasingly withdrawn and remote constituency of fellow experts, and abandoning the wider world of what they regard as brute politics to others.

Said argues that such a withdrawal was particularly evident among intellectuals in the humanities after a certain kind of critical theory took hold of the academy in the 1980s; an event that seemed to prompt in some intellectuals ever further hyper-specialisation, a process intensified by the proliferation of a formidable technical jargon, which, according to Said, led to a smaller and smaller circle of critics producing more and more books and articles for each other and seeming to care little about anything or anyone else;⁷ so that, far from the non-specialised amateurism and border-crossing interference espoused by Said, the particular mission of the humanities seemed at that point to represent precisely a kind of non-interference in the everyday world; a non-interference that, as Said puts it, meant a kind of laissez-faire: ‘ “they” can run the country, we will explicate Wordsworth and Schlegel.’⁸ The larger point of Said’s argument, of course, is that although academic professionals in the 1980s may have taken solace in their illusory separation from the ugly worldly political realities of the Age of Reagan, that separation also helped make the Age of Reagan possible in the first place, because academics—especially those in the humanities, with their formidable interpretive, representational and communicative skills—had abandoned the field to the political forces that brought Reagan to power.

Such wilful non-interference—which continues in the Age of Bush, of course—takes many different forms, from the cloistered academic’s naive sense of detachment from the social and political realities surrounding him or her to an even more deliberate fear of, or turning away from, political commitments. Indeed, if for Said the ultimate choice faced by the intellectual is not merely the one between interference and non-interference, but rather the one between being a professional supplicant or an unrewarded (if not altogether stigmatised) amateur,⁹ nothing can be more reprehensible in his view than

those habits of mind in the intellectual that induce avoidance, that characteristic turning away from a difficult and principled position which you know to be the right one, but which you decide not to take. You do not want to appear too political; you are afraid of seeming controversial; you need the approval of a boss or an authority figure; you want to keep a reputation for being balanced, objective, moderate; your hope is to be asked back, to consult, to be on a board or prestigious committee, and so to remain within the respectable mainstream; someday you hope to get an honorary degree, a big prize, perhaps even an ambassadorship. For an intellectual these habits of mind are corrupting par excellence.¹⁰

The proper role of the intellectual, then, according to Said, is to maintain intellectual and political integrity, and to speak out, like one of Benda’s lonely clerics, against all the odds, and despite all costs to oneself.

Speaking the truth to power—actively interfering with it—is something Said saw as a moral obligation once one is in a position to do so. Once one is comfortably tenured at a major university, say, and enjoying the freedom and relative security that go along with such a position, it would be, for Said, not just irresponsible but also a kind of moral failing not to speak out on public matters, especially the ones that urgently require intervention. Few intellectuals choose to take on such a public role, of course, much less to associate ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Representing public intellectuals
• Humanism as worldly affiliation
• Contrapuntal rhythms: Music as critical metaphor
• Europe, orientalism and popular culture
• Palestine and settler-colonial contexts
• Index