Trials of Arab Modernity

Literary Affects and the New Political

Tarek El-Ariss

• Publisher: Modern Language Initiative
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780823252350
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern Literary
• Index: Literature

Challenging prevalent conceptualizations of modernity—which treat it either as a Western ideology imposed by colonialism or as a universal narrative of progress and innovation—this study instead offers close readings of the simultaneous performances and contestations of modernity staged in works by authors such as Rifa'a al-Tahtawi, Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, Tayeb Salih, Hanan al-Shaykh, Hamdi Abu Golayyel, and Ahmad Alaidy.In dialogue with affect theory, deconstruction, and psychoanalysis, the book reveals these trials to be a violent and ongoing confrontation with and within modernity. In pointed and witty prose, El-Ariss bridges the gap between Nahda (the so-called Arab project of Enlightenment) and postcolonial and postmodern fiction.

Chapter One: Introduction: Debating Modernity

I wonder whether we may not envisage modernity rather as an attitude [bodily posture] than as a period of history. And by “attitude,” I mean a mode of relating to contemporary reality; a voluntary choice made by certain people; in the end, a way of thinking and feeling; a way, too, of acting and behaving that at one and the same time marks a relation of belonging and presents itself as a task.

—Michel Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?”

The events of Rashid al-Daif’s (b. 1945) novel Tablit al-Bahr (Paving over the sea) (2011) begin in 1860, following the sectarian massacres that claimed the lives of thousands in Lebanon and Syria and led to a French military intervention. Al-Daif’s main character, Faris, whose family survives the killing in Mount Lebanon, is meant to represent the subject of Arab Enlightenment in the nineteenth century who goes on to study medicine at the Syrian Protestant College, later known as the American University of Beirut. Faris’s childhood friend and future classmate is none other than Jurji Zaidan (1861–1914), precursor of Arabic literary modernity. In one episode, the narrator explains how Faris and Jurji, in need of a corpse for their autopsy class, conspire to smuggle Faris’s deceased aunt on a mule through Ottoman checkpoints from the village to their college in Beirut. Dissecting corpses in autopsy class and exploring the body in sexual encounters interspersed throughout the narrative anchor the discourse on Arab modernity in the relation to the body.

Al-Daif’s treatment of modernity does not directly engage 1860 as the historical turning point that set in motion various social and political movements that led, eventually, to the creation of Lebanon. Nor does he present Zaidan as the modern Arab author and master of the historical novel. Nor does he situate the study of medicine and debates about Darwinism as the cornerstone of an Arab scientific modernity. Instead, al-Daif’s modernity is constituted through various accidents and encounters centered on the body that take place in between Beirut and the countryside, Lebanon and the Americas, and medicine and literature. Modernity is performed in acts of smuggling corpses at night, autopsy sessions, sexual experimentation between two teenage friends, and missing home cooking while abroad. It also takes shape in the effects of the French military intervention in Beirut on prostitution and, in turn, on the sexual mores of the local population. Al-Daif’s work stages modernity through symptoms and affects that require diagnosis and interpretation, thereby questioning modernity’s association with the political and cultural project of Arab Enlightenment starting in the nineteenth century.

Focusing on the body as a site of rupture and signification, Trials of Arab Modernity shifts the paradigm for the study of modernity in the Arab context from questions of representation and cultural exchange to an engagement with a genealogy of symptoms and affects. It traces a series of experiences and encounters arising from leaving home, aversion to food, disorientation, anxiety attacks, and physical collapse embodied in travelogues, novels, poetic fragments, and anecdotes from the nineteenth century to the present. Bridging the gap between Nahda or the so-called Arab project of Enlightenment, or Renaissance, and postcolonial and postmodern fiction, this study challenges the prevalent conceptualizations of modernity, both those that treat it as a Western ideological project imposed by colonialism, and others that understand it as a universal narrative of progress and innovation.

In literature, the Arab poet and critic Adonis (b. 1930) interprets modernity (ḥadātha) as innovation (iḥdāth) vis-à-vis tradition, thereby tracing it to the Abbasid poet Abu Nuwas (756–814), among others. Questioning its treatment as a time period and a project originating in Europe, Adonis argues that modernity is a process of renewal that systematically supplants traditional forms of literary production.¹ Engaging Adonis’s understanding of modernity as a process of innovation (iḥdāth) in relation to tradition, I read modernity in the event (ḥadath) or events (aḥdāth)² in order to simultaneously engage nineteenth-century travel narratives and Arabic writing in the virtual age. An event (ḥadath), according to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “is not another moment within time, but something that allows time to take off on a new path.”³ In the Arab context, ḥadath is intertwined with ḥādith (accident) and ḥāditha (episode). The plural, aḥdāth and ḥawādith,⁴ have been used to denote conflict. Such conflicts as the war and genocide of 1860 as well as the Lebanese civil war (1975–90), for instance, are referred to as al-aḥdāth—sites of catastrophic unfolding that could not be named and thus reveal themselves only through a process of interpretation and analysis. Aḥdāth also mean scattered news and anecdotes that circulate within and across texts and registers.

This study reframes Arab modernity (ḥadātha) as a somatic condition, which takes shape through accidents and events (aḥdāth) emerging in and between Europe and the Arab world, the literary text and political discourse. Focusing on travelers and literary characters as they wander, run, take shelter, crouch, faint, panic, and go mad, I identify the simultaneous performances and contestations—or trials—of modernity in experiences and encounters in Cairo and London, in the interstices of the novel and the travelogue, writing and blogging. This book reveals the unfolding of these trials as a violent and ongoing confrontation with and within modernity, decentering yet also redefining and producing it. Through modes of revealing (kashf) and hacking (ikhtirāq, tansīf)—notions I carefully explore in various chapters—these trials take shape in intervals and instantaneous flashes. Modernity emerges from these trials and events—asymmetrical and fleeting aḥdāth. I engage texts at the level of uncertainty, ambiguity, and incoherence. Rather than presenting an exhaustive account of Arab literary modernity, this book offers close readings of specific encounters and texts in which modernity is performed.

Debating Modernity

The question of modernity has dominated Arab intellectual thought from Qasim Amin’s (1863–1908) call for the “liberation” of women⁵ to Taha Hussein’s (1889–1973) situating Egypt’s civilizational trajectory within that of the West.⁶ Other thinkers address the relation between cultural development and the production of Arab subjectivity and social and political institutions.⁷ Georges Tarabishi (b. 1939), for instance, undertakes a psychoanalytic reading of Arab modernity, situating it in structures of trauma and lack. According to Tarabishi, Arab intellectual debates about progress, authenticity, and tradition are conditioned by lack. This lack permeates Arab discursive production and shapes the relation to the Arab past on the one hand and to the West on the other.⁸ For his part, Sadiq Jalal al-Azm (b. 1934) undertakes a Marxist critique of Arab society’s blind embrace of Nahda liberation discourse without adequately scrutinizing traditional forms of authority and beliefs. According to al-Azm, the 1967 Arab defeat against Israel, or Naksa, exposed the absence of this radical critique and exacerbated the discrepancy between the discourse on modernity and Arab social and political structures.⁹

Debates about Arab modernity from the nineteenth century onward have recently had to contend with new social and political practices that generate different concerns and require new interpretive models. Talal Asad has shown that the association of modernity with secularism in the context of the postcolonial nation-state has shifted dramatically.¹⁰ From Islamist institutions and alternative communities to the social movements that brought about the events of the Arab Spring starting in 2010, modernity is refigured and reimagined across the Arab world. The avatars of an Arab “modernity in trial” organize and mobilize through social media, imagine communities through online fatwa banks and dating sites, and produce literary works wherein English and Arabic, tweets and verse, seamlessly coexist. These trials systematically question modernity’s association with humanism and secularism and its opposition to tradition.¹¹ They also create the possibility for rethinking modernity in the nineteenth century by identifying its production in writing practices and community activism, which involve texts and events that are traditionally excluded from modernity’s master narrative.

Trials of Arab Modernity draws on both classical and modern Arabic literature and thought, and contemporary theory and philosophy. Reading affects as a counterpart to the question of representation, which has governed literary studies for so long, is key for identifying new crossings between the literary and the political, experience and writing. These links are inscribed in the body, a site of literary and cultural narratives and histories. In Body Consciousness: A Philosophy of Mindfulness and Somaesthetics (2008), Richard Shusterman reads the body as the “organizing core of experience.”¹² He introduces the notion of “somaesthetics,” employing the word “soma” to denote “the living, feeling, sentient, purposive body rather than a mere physical corpus of flesh and bones.”¹³ “The body,” according to Shusterman, “expresses the ambiguity of human being, as both subjective sensibility that experiences the world and as an object perceived in that world.”¹⁴ The body has agency and thus could not be reduced to a medium, prison, or object of representation in critical discourse. In Neuropolitics: Thinking, Culture, Speed (2002), William Connolly creates a dialogue between neuroscience and cultural theory, critiquing the body’s dismissal as a scientifically predetermined object of study.¹⁵ He claims that “culture involves practices in which the porosity of argument is inhabited by more noise, unstated habit, and differential intensities of affect.”¹⁶ Understanding culture thus requires acts of listening, experiencing, and closely examining the sensorial and the somatic as they take shape in texts and practices, moments of collapse and projection.¹⁷

In The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics (2009), Charles Hirschkind examines the function of Muslim sermon tapes by exploring the human sensorium as site of production and proliferation of social, ethical, and political practices. Elaborating on William Connolly’s analysis of “visceral modes of appraisal” that cannot be assessed at conscious and intellectual levels, Hirschkind argues that the “new Islamic political” cannot be reduced to revivalist ideology and texts but rather must be explored in listening acts. It is to be found in Cairo’s “acoustic architecture,” which impinges on the human sensorium and thus orients believers “within the modern city as a space of moral action.”¹⁸ In line with Talal Asad’s argument about secular practices that take shape through forms of bricolage that defy secular/religious binary, Hirschkind argues that “the senses are not a stable foundation upon which a singular and unassailable truth can be erected, as an empiricist epistemology would claim, but rather a space of inderteminacy, heterogeneity, and possibility.”¹⁹ Elaborating on Leigh Eric Schmidt’s reading of the rise of modern subjectivity through the proliferation of auditory technology and practices starting in the eighteenth century,²⁰ Hirschkind argues that the question of visuality and the mistrust of hearing are constitutive of the Enlightenment project with which Arab modernity is associated as well. The emphasis on seeing, mapping, and reading the text and recognizing its letters thus marginalizes other sensory forms and experiences wherein new meaning is produced and, as I argue, the trials of Arab modernity take shape. Thus, the attention to listening in Hirschkind’s study allows him to explore a wider sensorium that is visceral yet not irrational. Suffice it to say that this critical model displaces both the Enlightenment’s oculocentricity and the primacy of the “Western gaze” when examining Arab modernity.²¹ This is not to claim that listening or tasting has replaced seeing, but that the trials of Arab modernity are activated at a variety of sensorial levels embodied in the texts I examine.

The critique of modernity as an intellectual project that could be engaged only through a specific set of binaries involving the rational and the irrational, the representational and the material, is echoed in theoretical departures from questions of duality and the figurative in contemporary theory. In Parables for the Virtual Moment (2002), Brian Massumi argues that a return to the body without the fear of the metaphysics of presence is key to moving beyond stultified forms of criticism.²² Reading bodily affects through Spinoza, Bergson, and Deleuze, among others, Massumi argues that affect and resistance, intensity and rupture should be reinscribed in a dynamic space of transformation. Distinguishing it from emotion, Massumi argues that affect is “resistant to critique”²³ and to signification. Affect is force and duration, which bind space-time through an “impingement” on the body. This emphasis on affect breaks with dialectical engagement with texts and ideas, and, as Massumi argues, with the figurative framework of literary criticism and its emphasis on representation.

In a similar vein, Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth argue that affect theory introduces new sites of embodiment and performativity.

Affect arises in the midst of in-between-ness: in the capacities to act and be acted upon. Affect is an impingement or extrusion . . . of forces or intensities . . . that pass body to body . . . in those resonances that circulate about, between, and sometimes stick to bodies and worlds. . . . [Affects are] visceral forces beneath, alongside, or generally other than conscious knowing, vital forces insisting beyond emotion—that can serve to drive us toward movement, toward thought and extension. . . . Indeed, affect is persistent proof of a body’s never less than ongoing immersion in and among the world’s obstinacies and rhythms, its refusals as much as its invitations.²⁴

Given this formulation, the bodily, the physical, and movement itself are sites of transformation and new meaning. This attempted definition, which simulates the affective, moves the debate beyond representation. While Rei Terada’s Feeling in Theory: Emotions after the “Death of the Subject” (2003) engages works by Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida in order to read affects ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Translation and Transliteration
• 1. Introduction: Debating Modernity
• 2. Fantasy of the Imam
• 3. Aversion to Civilization
• 4. Staging the Colonial Encounter
• 5. Majnun Strikes Back
• 6. Hacking the Modern
• 7. Conclusion: Writing the New Political
• Notes
• Glossary
• Bibliography