78 Howe Edward Said and Marxism PDF

EDWARD SAID AND MARXISM
ANXIETIES OF INFLUENCE
Stephen Howe
o his admirers, Edward Said hasespecially since his death come to be seen as the ideal type of critical intellectual, and Orientalism an ur-text for multiple enquiries and intellectual or even personal transmutations. For Timothy Brennan, Orientalism
turned out to be not only a book for knowing but a manual for doing. It was not just a book to emulate, but a book whose content addressed how to be the sort of intellectual Said himself became in the writing of it. This is why it cannot be exhausted. We pour ourselves into it, and therefore get ourselves back, but transformed. (2001, 99)
This sounds strangely similar to Louis Althussers rhapsodic evocation of the inexhaustible, transformative experience of reading Marxs Capital:
we have been able to read it every day, transparently, in the dramas and dreams of our history, in its disputes and conXicts, in the defeats and victories of the workers movement which is our only hope and our destiny. (Althusser and Balibar 1970, 13)
Yet even if Saids work stimulates in some devotees an enthusiasm comparable to that felt for Marxs by some followers, the actual relationship has been notably problematic.1 It is striking that, although many of Saids admirers would call themselves Marxists, a great deal of the most probingly critical (not to mention the most sweepingly hostile) commentary on Saids work has also come from Marxists. Said discussed his own attitude to Marxism at various times, but ordinarily in ways that were brief, allusive, ambivalentand when he was more forthcoming, it was largely when directly challenged on the issue by interviewers, rather than in his own written texts. In one
Cultural Critique 67Fall 2007Copyright 2007 Regents of the University of Minnesota
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such interview he said that Marxism, in so far as it is an orthodoxy, an ontology, even an epistemology, strikes me as extraordinarily insufWcient . . . but Ive never indulged in anti-Marxism either (Said 1992b, 259). He linked this insufWciency to the political irrelevance of academic Marxism in the United States and the dogmatism and pro-Sovietism of political Marxism in the Arab world (25961). That leaves, he went on, nevertheless, a great deal there to be interested in (261). Many of the theorists and activists for whom Said expressed greatest admiration, from C. L. R. James to Theodor Adorno, Raymond Williams to Amilcar Cabral, occupied some place in the very broad church of non-Soviet Marxism; and he intermittently engagedin largely though never unmixedly positive termswith the work of major Marxist theorists of aesthetics from Lukcs (e.g., Said 1976b, 1995b, and the strikingly laudatory invocation of Lukcs in 2000c, xviii) to Fredric Jameson (e.g., Said 1982). He once said, sounding almost defensive, that he had always tried my best to deal with it [Marxist thought] in a very vigorous way (1992b, 261). Yet the most important, or at least most evident, relevant intellectual relationships were not with Marxism as a body or tradition either of thought or of political action (or a cluster of them) but with a number of individual thinkers who are conventionally designated as Marxist: Adorno and Gramsci, Lukcs and Fanon, Williams and, more broadly and diffusely, Marxist historians writing on imperialism. One may well wonder whether these very disparate Wgures who, furthermore, tended to Wgure in or exert an apparent inXuence on often quite different parts and periods of Saids workactually have enough in common for the Marxist label to have much analytical usefulness in relation to them all. It may also be noted that only certain kinds of Marxism and of Marxist feature at all substantively in relation to Saids work. Said closely engaged with a speciWcally Western Marxismboth in Perry Andersons (1976) sense of a western European intellectual tradition focused mostly on philosophical and aesthetic questions, and in the later conWguration of a mainly Anglophone academic milieu. In a very different fashion and later in his career, he attended to a diffuse assemblage of radical and Marxist thinkers from the colonial and postcolonial worlds. He had little apparent intellectual contact either with the classical Marxist tradition of political economy and direct political
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engagement, or with the latter-day successors of that tradition: indeed one might say his links with the latter came only at second hand, as mediated through the work of some Marxist historians, mostly British, for whom he expressed admiration. Certainly there is no substantial discussion of or reference to Marxs (or Engelss) own major writings anywhere in Saids. Nor is thereperhaps more surprisinglyany signiWcant attention to Marxist theories of imperialism. Although some such theorists are mentioned, mostly in approving terms, in Saids writings their ideas are not actually discussed or evaluated. There is also little reference anywhere in his oeuvre to distinctively Marxist ideas emanating from the Arab, or more speciWcally the Palestinian, milieu. This too may surprise some: indeed some critics have noted this omission with some sharpness and feel that, both in his more wide-ranging work and in his speciWcally political, Palestinian writings, Said culpably neglected the thought of, for instance, Palestinian Communists like Emile Habibi, Emil Touma, and TawWq Zayyat. Such Wgures, it is suggested, anticipated much of what Said said about the IsraeliPalestinian conXict. (Said admiringly references Habibis Wction but not his political writings or activities.) Given all of the foregoing, is there any particular importance in identifying, tracing, or debating Saids, or any other particular contemporary thinkers, afWliations to or divergences from something called Marxism, or to and from some almost inevitably very heterogeneous assemblage of writers who may more or less aptly be thus labeled? What follows here is in large part exegetical and thus deliberately ducks that question, though I return to it in conclusion. Obviously, it matters more or in different ways in some contexts than in others, and Said operated in an unusually diverse set of such contexts. One of these was a U.S. political context of what some have labeled an East Coast Counter-Establishment along with such Wgures as Noam Chomsky, Richard Falk, and Eqbal Ahmad. Here, shared activist political perspectives, above all a mutual anti-imperialism in relation to U.S. foreign policy, were more important than whether individuals called themselves Marxists (some did; probably more did not). In the Palestinian political world, the latter question counted for more, but did so, one might venture, largely and increasingly in the sense that Marxist, there, is a particular species of the genus secularist. In North Atlantic academic worlds, whether one was a Marxist probably
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mattered more again, but in ever more depoliticised ways. In reaction against this, Said averred that belonging or not belonging to a Marxist tradition seems to me interesting only if they are connected to a practice, which in turn is connected to a political movement (1992b, 259). And as Saids work was read and responded to elsewhere, perhaps especially in India, perceived relations to Marxism took on yet different and more highly charged connotationsthough here, too, connotations where attitudes to religion are crucial. The past two decades or so witnessed a remarkable sea change in the nature of academic attention to colonial and postcolonial questions, especially among radicals: crudely, from political and economic to cultural, from empiricist to theoreticist (with strong deconstructionist, postmodernist, and discourse-analytical inXuences), from state to civil society, from the techniques of rule to the languages of race. In all this, Saids work was generally seen as the inaugurating moment. And insofar as these shifts involved an abandonment or at least relative neglect of themes and preoccupations with which Marxists had been especially concerned, there was an inevitable tendency to blame his inXuence, as was done by Indian Marxist social historian Sumit Sarkar (1994; 1997) and more heatedly by critic Aijaz Ahmad (1992). A little later, from within the subdisciplines of colonial and postcolonial literary or cultural theory, a distinctively materialist or neo-Marxist current offered sharp critiques of much post-Saidian work in these Welds, though in this case they ordinarily did not directly attack Said himself (see many of the essays in such collections as Bartolovich and Lazarus 2002 or Chrisman 2003). There is even, in some of this work, a touch of what one might ungenerously think of as the czarist Russian little father syndrome: whatever one is dissatisWed with must be the fault not of the czar himself but of his wicked or misguided underlings. Saids Wrst book, to which he has almost never subsequently referred and which has not been reprinted, was a revised version of his doctoral thesis on Joseph Conrad (Said 1966). The book is a relatively narrowly focused study of autobiographical currents in Conrads short stories and novels, illuminated through a close reading of his personal letters. It offers few if any anticipations of Saids later main themes, making almost no reference to colonial questions, and certainly does not cast Conrad as an imperialist writer. If anything,
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the reverse: one might suggest a subterranean linkage in Saids text between discussion of Conrads origins in conquered and subjugated Poland, and the Palestinian fate. If this is so, it is never made explicit; though in much later writings, Said pointed to these connections, both political and biographical, as keys to his abiding fascination with Conrad. Heart of Darkness, for instance, is not discussed as a colonial text (though Kurtzs status as arch-European is noted in passing) but as a representation of the historic predicament of mind-tortured modern Europe (1966, 113). Mind-tortured, that is, because of the existential predicament of intellectuals caught between contemplation and action, not, as the later Said would suggest, for directly political reasons or ones connected with Europes overseas imperial expansion. Even when, a decade later and well after Said had already become intensely engaged with the politics of the Middle East, he returned to close discussion of Conrad in his Beginnings, the colonial theme raised its head only with tantalizing brevity, when Captain Mitchells clash with the bloodthirsty Sotillo in Nostromo emphasizes the disparity between colonial and native (1975a, 101). Conrad, then, had only passing hints of the preoccupations that were to distinguish almost all Saids subsequent work. A wide range of philosophers and literary theorists, some of them Marxists, is alluded to in the bookSartre, Heidegger, Lucien Goldmann, Blackmur, Niebuhr, Jaspers, Auerbach, and perhaps most frequently, Lukcs and Schopenhauerbut it does not present, and is certainly not organized around, theoretical or philosophical concerns as such. The book that established Said as an inXuential and innovative younger critic was his second, Beginnings. Published in 1975, it was both an intensely theoretical endeavor and a work with considerably more political undertones than his Wrst book. This, the mid-1970s, was the Wrst moment of theory in North American literary criticism. What had previously seemed a rather staid academic discipline, dominated on the one hand by the aesthetics of the New Criticism and on the other by philology, was being transformed by an infusion of ideas drawn mainly from French philosophy and linguistic analysis. Said himself, with Beginnings and a number of associated theoretical essays (see 1971a, 1971b; 1984a), was at the forefront of this change, accompanied by several other highproWle critics of whom the most inXuential was Paul de Man at Yale.
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Yet it soon became apparent that Saids approach and intentions were radically different from theirs. As he later noted (e.g., 1984a, 3) the newfound enthusiasm for theory in the 1970s was widely seen as insurrectionary, somehow associated with the radical ferment of 1968 and after in U.S., French, and other Western universities and societies. In fact, though, the impact of the new theoretical currents in North America soon appeared to become far removed from any obvious political engagement. Indeed, as Said complained, much of this work abandoned the existential actualities of human life, politics, societies and events (1984a, 5). Already in a 1976 interview, he was saying that, while he shared many of the theoretical interests of critics like Harold Bloom and of the Yale deconstructionists, he regretted their lack of concern with historical and political questions (1976a, 31, 33, 35). Said, by contrast, was ever more directly concerned to press for political relevance and engagement in literary study. More strikingly still, he remained in some troubled, ambiguous, but strong sense a traditional humanist, at a time when French-model antihumanism was hegemonic among avant-garde criticsas indeed it still was in the late 1990s. Even when Said was most under the inXuence of such theories, in the 1970s, he kept his distance from them in this regard, frequently qualifying Foucaults and Derridas antihumanism with such adjectives as bleak, tyrannical, and nihilistic. His insistence at the end of Orientalism that there could be, and indeed was, a knowledge and discourse that was not corrupt or blind but emancipatory (1978, 326) was, he later suggested, deliberately antiFoucault (1987b, 137). And in early essays like that on Merleau-Ponty (1967), his enthusiasm is reserved for those Wgures in modern French thought who stress the immediacy and concreteness of lived experiencethose who remain humanistsas against the constructors of grand but alienating philosophical systems. Beginnings may further surprise observers of the later Said by its unThird Worldliness, even, if you like, its Eurocentrism. Said had been passionately involved in Middle East affairs since the 1967 war and its devastating impact on him, but this passion remained in a compartment separate from his academic work until 1978s Orientalism brought together literature and politics in a mixture that all Saids subsequent writing kept up. In an interview, he spoke of Orientalism as marrying what had previously been two equally intense but
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parallel and separate concerns: literature and culture, on the one hand, and studies and analyses of power, on the otherand it is clear in context that by the latter he means crucially his direct political involvement with Palestinian affairs (1993b, 23). Beginnings, in contrast, drops in only a scattered allusion or two to Arab literature, to Frantz Fanon, and (as one of Saids prime examples of how authors, in creating a story, also recreate themselves) to T. E. Lawrence. Very little in this product of an erudite, ambitious young American professor anticipates the angry older man, the scourge of colonialism and Zionism, that was the latter-day Said. Even when Said, in a separate essay around the same time, discussed Lawrence in closer detail, he was interested mainly in him as an example of a special but extreme form of life: the decentered one (in 2000c, 32; originally published in 197071) and as someone who sought to Wnd a psychic home through writing. Saids Lawrence, like his Conrad, is depicted in ways that make him startlingly like the younger Saids image of himself: an internally divided, homeless, exilic consciousness. He is only incidentally a servant of Empire or an actor in Middle East politics. Nonetheless, there are important connections between the earlier and the later work. As Timothy Brennan (1992) has pointed out, almost all Saids subsequent preoccupations may be found at least in embryo in Beginnings and in Saids responses to criticism of that work, especially an interview carried by the journal Diacritics (Said 1976a). Some of these connections may be sought in the idea of beginning itself. Said was always interested in the notion of politics as an affair of rival narratives, with each movement trying to validate its picture of the world by telling a tale about its own birth and origin. The Israeli Palestinian conXict is for him a classic example (see, for example, Said 1984b and 1986a). He often noted that presenting the Palestinian case in the world media means having to keep retelling the story from the start, insisting that there is a story. Later he would link these political concerns even more directly with questions of literary stylean association of ideas that might be thought either penetrating or preposterousas for instance in describing the 1988 Palestine National Council meeting as dominated by obsessive postmodern rhetorical anxieties. . . . Words, commas, semicolons, and paragraphs were the common talk of each recess, as if we were attending a convention of grammarians (1994a, 147). Indeed this became a characteristic trope
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of Said: to link the uses or abuses of language directly with political programs. This is already associated, in Beginnings, with what was to become perhaps Saids most central term of approbation and self-identiWcation: the secular critic. The idea of the beginning is contrasted with that of origins: a discourse of origins involves mythologizing and privileging its subject, while that of Beginnings is always more provisional, less authoritative, more mobile and open to critique, more resistant to totalizing aspirations. In a wordthe word Said thereafter used to encompass all thisit is secular. Part of the perceived novelty of Orientalism, a few years later, came from the strikingly inclusive range of sources through which Said traced the orientalist discourse: scholarly tomes, novels, travelogues, philological and religious texts, and policy brieWngs from institutes close to government. Beginnings, despite its relative lack of attention to nonNorth Atlantic writings, already anticipates part of this catholicity, or eclecticism, drawing in Wction and autobiography, philosophical and linguistic writings, psychoanalysis, and religious texts like Ernest Renans Life of Jesus. Also anticipating later developments was that, although the books focus was of course overwhelmingly literary and philosophical, its Wnal pages shifted intriguingly toward a political register. The issue of opposition to the Vietnam War, as energizing focus for intellectual debate, raised its head (375). The theme of hostility toward intellectual specialization, hierarchy, and authority, to which Said was so often later to return, was mooted (379). And in a remarkably unexpected conjunction of names Said suggested, in the context of emphasis on the evident irregularity and discontinuity of knowledge that
here Foucault and Deleuze rejoin the adversary epistemological current found in Vico, in Marx and Engels, in Lukcs, in Fanon, and also in the radical political writings of Chomsky, Kolko, Bertrand Russell, William A. Williams and others. (1975a, 378)
It is hard to see what enjoined the selection, among all possibly relevant political writers, of Noam Chomsky, Gabriel Kolko, Russell, and Williams except that all four were Werce critics of U.S. foreign policy, especially in Vietnam. A directly political, if still somewhat surreptitious, message was being signaled.2
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Beginnings is, then, not only a complex but an internally contradictory text; like so much of Saids later major work, it contains episodes where, as J. Hillis Miller said in his review of the book, the author constantly recognizes these contradictions, without quite recognizing them, in passages which are like slips of the tongue or of the pen (1976, 4). Saids own distinction between the writers authority and that authoritys inevitable molestationthe ways in which a narrator cannot avoid being aware of, and revealing, the artiWcial and even duplicitous character of his or her own ostensible narrative certainties (1975a, 8385; see also 1971b)could be turned against his own book. It is a work of philosophically saturated literary theory that intermittently signals its authors suspicion of the totalizing ambitions characteristic of such theorizing, a book almost entirely centered on the western European canon yet at least hinting that the most pressing and important intellectual issues lie beyond the purview of that tradition, a book whose main body has no overt political agenda but which in its closing pages begins half covertly to indicate the centrality of politics to Saids concerns, a text whose reception rested mainly on its enthusiastic presentation of contemporary French ideasespecially Foucaultsbut whose real hero was the almost entirely incompatible Wgure of Vico, a book written in a largely impersonal style yet pursuing an intensely personal and even idiosyncratic agenda. Said followed Beginnings with a series of essays on related themes of literary theory, collected in The World, the Text, and the Critic (1984a). They date from the early 1970s and are inevitably disparate in their theoretical and political preoccupations as well as in their subject matter.3 So far as the texts thus yoked together have a unifying common thread, it lies in reXection on the nature of criticism itselfprimarily, though not exclusively, literary criticism. More speciWcally, it lies in defense and advocacy of a particular model of criticism: in the title words of the essays that begin and end the collection, advocacy of secular as against religious criticism.4 In various pieces in The World, the Text, and the Critic, Said sees the secular as exempliWed in Wgures as diverse as Jonathan Swift, Giambattisto Vico, Eric Auerbach, and (for all their centrality to the orientalist tradition) Raymond Schwab and Louis Massignon. Conversely, the targets of Saids negative critique are not only the explicitly or conventionally religious
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criticsfrom postwar U.S. New Criticism to those who treat Walter Benjamin as a de-MarxiWed mysticbut all those who propose or adopt modes of theorizing that, in his opinion, totalize or mystify their own formation or that downgrade or eschew historical inquiry and political engagement: here, for instance, not only Jacques Derrida and, increasingly, Michel Foucault but even more their American epigones are found at fault. Thus most self-proclaimedly radical academic theorizing in the United States is lambasted for its hermetic self-absorption, its political irrelevance:
the oppositional manner of new New Criticism does not accurately represent its ideas and practice, which, after all is said and done, further solidify and guarantee the social structure and the culture that produced them. Deconstruction, for example, is practiced as if Western culture were being dismantled; semiotic analysis argues that its work amounts to a scientiWc and hence social revolution in the sciences of man. . . . There is oppositional debate without real opposition. In this setting, even Marxism has often been accommodated to the wild exigencies of rhetoric while surrendering its true radical prerogatives. (1984a, 15960)
The supposed political engagement of many academics, then, is revealed on close examination to be no more than a haphazard anecdotal content enriched neither by much knowledge of what politics and political issues are all about nor by any very developed awareness that politics is something more than liking or disliking some intellectual orthodoxy now holding sway over a department of literature (172). Said was to suggest (in 1982, 2) that in reaction against such trends, it was worth attempting a bold, sweeping argument about the relationship of culture to power, even at the risk of seeming crudely polemical. In later work, Said became especially and increasingly hostile to postmodernist theory, saying of contemporary U.S. intellectuals that Jargons of an almost unimaginable rebarbativeness dominate their styles . . . an astonishing sense of weightlessness with regard to the gravity of history and individual responsibility fritters away attention to public matters, and to public discourse (1984a, 36667; the complaint is forcefully reiterated in Said 1994b, 2122, and in 2000c, xxiii, where he suggests that anti-foundationalist arguments like those of Hayden White or Richard Rorty could only come from minds so untroubled by and free of the immediate experience of the turbulence
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of war, ethnic cleansing, forced migration, and unhappy dislocation). He insisted that he was himself, by contrast, motivated above all by politico-moral concerns: anger at injustice, an intolerance of oppression, and some fairly unoriginal ideas about freedom and knowledge (1976a, 36). And with a Wnal rhetorical twist of the knife, Said scorns literary theorys pretence to radicalism: theory is taught so as to make the student believe that he or she can become a Marxist, a feminist, an Afrocentrist, or a deconstructionist with about the same effort and commitment required in choosing items from a menu (1993a, 389). Such direct and emphatic insistence on the centrality of political concerns to the tasks of literary criticism was, naturally, far from being a solitary idiosyncrasy of Said, but in the 1970s it was still associated largely with Marxist critics. And although by this time the work of such major European Marxist writers on aesthetics as Benjamin and Lukcs was belatedly being discovered by Anglophone readers, and its importance urged by people like Raymond Williams and Terry Eagleton in Britain and Fredric Jameson in America, the Marxist critical tradition in English was still viewed as consisting mainly of Wgures from the 1930s like Christopher Caudwell and Ralph Fox, whose tendency to a fairly crude economism and whose academic marginality (not to mention their premature deaths: Caudwell and Fox were both killed in the Spanish Civil War) meant they were not taken very seriously by the scholarly mainstream. Said, with his own complex but fairly distant relationship to Marxism was urging the politicization of literary study from a very different direction and in a more sophisticated form. In these mostly very brief evocations of a generalized idea of Marxism in Saids earlier work, what is perhaps most striking is that it serves rhetorically as an image of what a truly and fully politically engaged criticism should be but ordinarily is not. Saids own political engagement, primarily with Middle East affairs, intensiWed from the early 1970s. His Wrst published writings on Middle Eastern affairs, or any other directly political subject, appear to have been the essays The Arab Portrayed and The Palestinian Experience, both from 1970 (Said 1970a,b). The former, an angry survey of the hostile images of Arabs widespread in American media and public discourse, anticipated some of the main themes in Orientalisms later sections. The latter mixed autobiography, personal impressions of various Arab
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countries where Palestinians lived in exile, sketches of recent history, and reXection on current political trends including the new emergence of an organized Palestinian resistance: a blending of themes that was, again, to characterize much of his later work. During that year he published two other articles on the subject: one a short response to Shlomo Avineris critique of The Palestinian Experience, the other a brief contribution to the Middle East Newsletter entitled A Palestinian Voice. The very titlesThe Arab Portrayed, The Palestinian Experience, A Palestinian Voicesuggested both the extremely general and the uncomfortably iconic stance adopted. It was as if, on the way to Wnding his own voice on such subjects, Said had Wrst to pose as an abstract representative, a laboratory specimen of the Arab or the Palestinian in American literary culture. But for some time, this strengthening preoccupation operated in parallel rather than interrelation with Saids literary studies. It was evident that he had already acquired a very substantial knowledge of regional affairs and of United States foreign policy; indeed an article like United States Foreign Policy and the ConXict of Powers in the Middle East (1973) referred to a range of ofWcial and quasi-ofWcial materials in the Weld probably wider than that used in any of Saids subsequent ventures into the subject. In its close engagement with such writings, its virtual absence of reference to speciWcally literary or cultural determinants, and its stress on the complexity and interest-driven rather than ideology-driven nature of American policy, this was close to being a piece of conventional international relations scholarship and quite unlike anything else Said has ever written. The full conjunction of that essays concerns and emphases, those of Said the activist-analyst of political powers everyday workings and the preoccupations of Said the literary scholar, was still to come. Its genesis could already be discerned in interview (1976a), in one or two mid-seventies essays (notably 1975b), and even, as we have seen, in a few passages of Beginnings. But so far as most readers were concerned, it seemed to be born fullgrown and almost unannounced with Orientalism. The main themes of Orientalism had been sketched out, in far briefer form, in 1975 with Saids contribution to a collection of essays on the impact of the 1973 ArabIsraeli war, with many of the same examples of contemporary (mainly U.S.) anti-Arab prejudice that feature in the later sections of Orientalism and the same foundational
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insistence that the key to orientalist thought is the binary, hierarchical opposition between East and West (Said 1975b). The overarching framework, however, was rather different from and simpler than what was to be presented three years later, perhaps in part because of the more directly politicized context and in part because the Foucauldian concept of discourse in 197475 had not yet become as central to Saids thinking on the issue as it was to be a few years later. In the earlier essay, although the term discourse is occasionally used and Foucault is referred to at the very end of the essay, orientalism is discussed mainly not as a discourse but as something simpler and more straightforwardly false: a system of myths. There is here little of the ambiguity or subtlety found in Orientalism about the relationship between Western images of the Orient and real Eastern societies: those images are presented as quite simply erroneous and malevolent. The dominant, institutionalized patterns of orientalist thought are dismissed, more sweepingly and crudely than was to be the case in Orientalism itself, with such epithets as culturally decadent, quite stupid, and fraudulent (Said 1975b, 425). But the myths on which they are founded (with Saids discussion of myth acknowledging a debt to Roland Barthes, but with the term mainly being employed simply to mean falsehood or delusion) are suggested to be in the process of being shattered. The unexpectedly effective performance of the Egyptian and other Arab armies against Israel in 1973 is celebrated as a major blow against such myths of Arab incapacity. The military efforts of the Arab states, therefore, are regarded as positive and effective in a way that the later Said would come wholly to repudiate, even though Said also insists that war Wnally determines nothing; at bottom it is only violence (447). He proclaims, in language it is hard to imagine him using even a little later, that the October War itself now seems like an act of theoretical will (445). Indeed where Foucaults work is invoked, it is as a footnote to the essays closing assertion that what is most needed is the intellectual equivalent of the war, which is sustained anti-mythological, self-conscious thought (447). Orientalism signaled its shift away from this directly politicoactivist orientation at the outset and, ironically, by its use of Karl Marxs words. It took as one of its epigraphs Marxs comment (originally made about French peasants) that they cannot represent themselves; they must be represented. Marx was not, of course, here
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expressing his own view of the peasantryalthough he did indeed have a pretty low opinion of its political potentiality as a classbut presenting what he took to be the Bonapartist attitude to them. The term representation has had two main meanings: a political and an artistic one: to represent in the sense of acting or standing in for, as in the notion of representative democracy where elected politicians rule, supposedly, on behalf of the people; and to represent in the sense of depicting or designating. Marxs original comment had been meant in the Wrst sense only, but it is precisely the links between the two that form Saids subject: how artistic and other depictions of the East relate to and further political substitutions, where Westerners dominated and remade Eastern societies.5 Pursuing this theme in the way that soon became enormously inXuential, Said did so without either acknowledging a signiWcant Marxist inXuence or undertaking further substantial use of Marxs own work, other than to indict him for his brief writings on India as himself an orientalist and Eurocentrist.6 Saids procedures were also very far from anything ordinarily thought of as Marxist inXuenced in another sense. He did not extend his discussion of orientalist discourse to include any writings produced in or for the kinds of institutions that had been the main focus of Marxist historians and indeed of Foucault, and that might well be thought more central to colonialist projects than the texts with which he did engage, such as courts and police forces, hospitals and asylums, armies and factories.7 Nor were scientiWc discourses, even those of pseudo-scientiWc racism, included apart from brief allusions to the support Social Darwinism gave to the colonial enterprise (227, 23233). Such huge omissions obviously reXected Saids own speciWcally literary intellectual formation and interests. And, although complaint at them is somewhat ungenerous in light of the great range of texts he did consider, the general tendency of his followers and of later cultural analysts of colonialism to replicate his blind spots was surely more surprising and indeed damaging to their enterprise. Moreover, in alluding to various genealogies for the orientalist idea, he made one quite striking omission: orientalism in political theory and historical sociology, in which Marxs Asiatic Mode of Production and Wittfogels Oriental Despotism (1957) might take their places (on this genealogy, see for instance Springborg 1992).
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Saids major 1993 book Culture and Imperialism represents in some ways a further dramatic break from its authors earlier writings. One of the most striking aspects of these is that it is, as these things are now understood in literary-academic circles, a quite Wercely untheoreticaleven antitheoreticalbook.8 Said there repeatedly expresses great scorn for the main currents of contemporary literary theory: which means his repudiation of much work that had developed partly under his own inXuence. Culture and Imperialism is marked also by explicit, repeated, and Werce rejections of the culturalism that has shaped so much recent writing about empire and its legacies. Discussion of imperialism in this writing has ever more often been framed by notions of a clash of cultures, between cultural imperialism and its supposed antithesis, cultural nationalism: shaped by assumptions of the kind announced (though also interestingly questioned) by Frantz Fanon, that every culture is Wrst and foremost national (Fanon 1967 [1961], 174). Many readers, accustomed to this genre of nationalist and identitarian thought, might have expected Culture and Imperialism to be a work in that vein, a polemic about the imperialist subjugation of some national culturesAfrican, Arab, Asianby other, Western ones (as Orientalism was so widely misconstrued to be). What Said actually does could hardly be more different. The books Wrst line of critique focuses on what Said suggests is the great retreat from radicalism in European thought since the 1970s, for which Wgures like Lyotard and Foucaultsymptomatically, once champions of Third World freedom movementsare emblematic (Said 1993a, 29). Its discourse proclaims the futility of revolution, the barbarism of postcolonial regimes, the ubiquity of Third World terrorism (30). The French post-Marxist intellectuals did not so much repeat Napoleons retreat from Moscow as seek symbolically to annul de Castriess defeat at Dien Bien Phu. This road from Conrad, as Said describes it, ends in either insensate hatred for Third World, and hence all, radicalism, or in the abject withdrawal from social engagement that Said, following Orwell and Rushdie (and, unacknowledged, Edward Thompson) calls being inside the whale. In this vein of polemic, we might characterize Saids relation to Marxism as a double negative: without saying anything particularly positive about the Marxist tradition, he is Wercely hostile toward some of the most inXuential post(and anti-) Marxists. As contrastingly positive models he invokes, as
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he had in earlier writing, Auerbach, Curtius, and the comparativist, philological tradition of which they were late luminaries, and then turns to geographical approaches, above all Gramscis writing on the Southern Question. He endorses his former student Timothy Brennans enthusiasm for Gramsci as a paradigm for understanding the transmutation, diffusion, and interpenetration of cultures over time (Said 1993a, 5658; and see Brennan 1989, 4050). This is but one of several afWrmative invocations of Gramcsis ideas scattered across Saids work. Some others will be considered a little later. But the use made of Gramsci here, in the early sections of Culture and Imperialism, points toward something far broader and more important. Behind Saids repeatedly rehearsed ambivalence over questions of collective identity, as behind many other recurring problems in his work, lies his relationship to various, perhaps incompatible, background inXuences on his thinking. Among these, two major, though conXicting, inspirations may be singled out: those of Foucault and of Gramsci. In a sense, then, digging deeper into the role of Marxism in Saids work requires at least brief attention, Wrst, to the opposite pole of attraction, the Wgure generally acknowledged as the most important non- or even anti-Marxist theoretical inXuence on Said: Michel Foucault. SpeciWcally within colonial and postcolonial studies it has been mostly through Saids use of his ideas, especially in Orientalism, that Foucault has gained global attention. In that book, though, Foucault is a background presence, providing some of its most important organizing assumptions, rather than an object of extended direct discussion. Saids own more detailed engagement with Foucault was conducted in other places, including a 1972 essay that appeared in the journal boundary 2, a long chapter of Beginnings, an obituary in Raritan (1984c), and two linked essays in The World, the Text and the Critic (Criticism between Culture and System and Travelling Theory). But in some of Saids other earlier essays the Foucauldian inXuence and tone are ubiquitous, as with a piece discussing Vicos ideas and style in terms of the body, language, and discipline (1976c). Much later Said was to repudiate, indeed brusquely dismiss, Foucaults inXuence. Brennan (2000; 2001) argues forcefully that a great deal of recent criticism has simply overstated Saids debt to Foucault, that indeed over and over again . . . Saids counter-Foucauldian demur, his
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balanced conclusions based on a cautious, and Wnally emphatic, departure from the work of that French thinker have been passed over as if they could not really have meant what they said or as if they had not existed at all (2001, 9091). Yet perhaps Brennan, reacting against this, in his turn understates Foucaults importance to Said, as he may also overstate the degree to which Orientalism isas he repeatedly insists (2000, 560; 2001, 87, 91, 9495, 96)a distinctively and inescapably American book. This slights the closeness of Saids engagement with some other national histories and public spheres, notably the British, French, and of course Arab. For in Beginnings Saids admiration for Foucault is near boundless. Les Mots et les Choses is described as a book whose literary and philosophical implications are overwhelming (Said 1975a. 285). Above all, for Said, Foucault is the one who begins a wholly novel way of seeing history and of reading texts: it is as the founder of a new Weld of research (or of a new way of conceiving and doing research) that he will continue to be known and regarded (291). It is this Foucault, from among the ever-growing number becoming available, whom Said takes as inspiration for his critique of orientalism. In The World, the Text, and the Critic, the distance between Said and Foucault is considerably greater and more fully articulated. In the long, dense, brilliantly argued Criticism between Culture and System, Foucault and Derrida are systematically measured against one another, to the formers advantage. But Said levels sharp criticisms against Foucault, too. There is argued to be a continuing, acknowledged but unresolved, uncertainty over the relationship between individual subjectivity or intentionality and collective force or structural determination (Said 1984a, 187). There is (and this is certainly at best an overstated claim) an alleged inability on Foucaults part to deal with, or provide an account of, historical change (188). Foucault is seen as successful in his detailed historical description, far less so in marshalling general explanationindeed his greatest strengths lie in his ability somehow to put aside his enormously complex theoretical apparatus . . . and let the material he has dug up create its own order and its own theoretical lessons (215). This is both a rather faint and a rather odd kind of praise: few historians practicing in the Welds with which Foucault has dealt would regard his strengths as an empirical historian, or as one willing to let his archival materials tell their own story, as being among his major claims to distinction.
67
In Criticism between Culture and System, and even more in Travelling Theory, the language in which Said criticizes Foucault has a markedly Marxian, and more speciWcally Gramscian, cast: these are arguably Saids most nearly Marxist texts:
The difference between discourse and such coarser yet no less signiWcant Welds of social combat as the class struggle is that discourse works its productions, discriminations, censorship, interdictions, and invalidations on the intellectual, at the level of base not of superstructure [sic? Surely Said means superstructure not base]. (Said 1984a, 216)
Indeed Foucaults distance from Marxist or Gramscian understandings of power is argued to be the source of his greatest weakness: the most dangerous consequence of his disagreement with Marxism (221). And here, drawing heavily on his own evolving work on empire, Said indicts Foucault above all for his blindness to the territorial and especially imperial dimensions of power 222). In Travelling Theory Said pushes the quarrel one stage further, arguing that a tendency to theoretical overtotalization . . . systematic degradation of theory (24243) in Foucault leads him, and even more his admiring acolytes, into providing alibis for political retrogression: Foucaults theory of power is a Spinozist conception, which has captivated not only Foucault himself but many of his readers who wish . . . to justify political quietism with sophisticated intellectualism, at the same time wishing to appear realistic, in touch with the world of power and reality (245). Foucaults imprisoning overtotalization is seen as all the more pernicious in its effects because it is formulated in terms of what seem to be historically documented situations (246). But this is ultimately a purely textualist history, with no room for emergent movements . . . revolution, counterhegemony, or historical blocks (246). All these criticisms, it will be apparent, are very much those that some commentators had made about Saids own Orientalism, or at least its more Foucauldian strands of argument. Against Foucault, Said poses the examples of Noam Chomsky and John Berger, who not only seek to deal with Wercely contested political issues (as Said suggests Foucault did not, rather unfairly overlooking his engagement with such questions as prisoners rights and antiracism) but manifest some intention of alleviating human suffering, pain, or betrayed hope (247).
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This complaint at the politically demobilizing, disabling consequences of Foucaults theory of power remained Saids central objection thereafter. He returned to it at further length in the essay Foucault and the Imagination of Power (Said 1986b). In Culture and Imperialism the later Foucault is quite simply dismissed as a political renegade along with Lyotard (1993a, 29). Later still, however, as in a 2000 New York Times review of some of Foucaults posthumously collected writings (2000b), Said was once again offering a more nuanced and in part admiring view, recognizing the relentless erudition, the fertility of intellect, and the extent of inXuence that the Frenchman could command, alongside the works sometimes severe shortcomings. Saids relation to Gramsci, whose inXuence had already been felt in Orientalism, is less intense, but remained more positive, than that to Foucault.9 Together with Raymond Williams and Theodor Adorno, Gramsci is by some margin the Marxist thinker most extensively referred to by Said. His is, however, a very particular reading of Gramsci, one stripped of his speciWc Marxist-Leninist afWliations. Said mainly praised, and believed he had learned from, aspects of Gramscis thought that were rather distant from his Marxism: his interests in geography and spatiality, his status as a literary humanist, his afWliations to a pessimistic materialist tradition in Italy (Said 1993b, 25).10 He was scornful, by contrast, of the latter-day leftist Gramsci industry: so vague, so out of touch with any political movement of any consequence (25). Said stresses the ambiguities in the crucial concept of hegemony, which leave it with only a kind of gross fascination, a gross applicability, and Wnds Gramscis main value to lie in the basically geographical cast of his thought: He thinks in terms of territories, in terms of locales, which is tremendously important to me (25). And he associates this territorial or geographical bent with an antideterminist, detotalizing, nonhomogenizing critical spirit, necessary counterpoint or corrective to the grand Hegelian tradition of analysis in terms of temporality, a tradition for which Lukcs is seen as the greatest modern exponent. In History, Literature, and Geography (2000c [1995b], 46368), the key contrast is that of Gramsci versus Lukcs: the work of Lukcs and all his (even unacknowledged) followers is about time, Gramscis is about space.11 Said frequently returned to this stress on ideas about space and geography, suggesting that, in Culture and Imperialism and other later
69
work, what I Wnd myself doing is really, in a certain sense, rethinking geography (1994b, 21). He associates this with a wider current of recent historical and cultural writing, of which he sees his work as part, of a kind of paradigm shift . . . a new, invigorated sense of looking at the struggle over geography in interesting and imaginative ways. In 2000, in Critical Inquiry, he again raised such themes in a wide-ranging discussion of the power of spatial, geographical imagination and analysis, including the immense burden of competing images and desires placed on the Palestinian landscape (2000a). Foucault once proclaimed, in slightly grandstanding style, that while the nineteenth century was preoccupied by time and history, our age concerns itself more with space and geography (Foucault 1986, 22). One could indeed perhaps say that the dominant organizing principle of postcolonial critique, starting with Said, has been that of space: spatial distance and difference, colonialisms control over physical space, over territory, images, and metaphors of mapping. Certainly that has been the consistent preoccupation of Saids work and that of his disciples, as of one phase in Foucaults itinerary and of the slightly later rediscovery of space in social theory elaborated by Neil Smith (1984) and Edward Soja (1989). Evidently and equally, this should not be overstated: there is rather little that is new in the various kinds of attention to space and geographylocal, national, and/or global currently proclaimed as novel. And what is arguably new is also that which is most speculative, contestable, and tenuous, as with certain postmodernist rhetorics of time-space compression or thirdspace trialectics (Soja 1996). Saids own association with such currents has been little more than gestural. Alongside and in many ways complementary to the Gramscian strain in Saids work is an inXuence less often noted but clearly important: that of the Welsh literary and political critic Raymond Williams.12 Said several times underlined the importance of Williamss book The Country and the City (1973), in particular, for his own thought. And in a public debate with Williams in London in 1986 and then a memorial lecture delivered in 1989 (Said 1986c; 1990b), Said strongly but sensitively traced his debts to the Welsh writer. Again, it was from Williamss ideas about geography that Said drew most; indeed he suggested that Williams was unique as a critic in that alone of his generation in the United States and Britain he was attuned to the
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astonishingly productive possibilities of the Gramscian critical consciousness, Wrmly rooted as that was in . . . landscapes, geographies, mobile spaces (2000c [1995b], 470). He underscored the radical differences between Williamss senses of place, of location, and origin, and his own: the power of Williamss work is intrinsically at one with its rootedness and even its insularity, qualities that stimulate in the variously unhoused and rootless energies of people like myself . . . a combination of admiring regard and puzzled envy (1990b, 84). But he did not, as less subtle and sympathetic critics of Williams (like Saids own student Gauri Viswanathan [1993]) had done, simply attack him for a supposed parochialism, cultural myopia, or colonialism. Rather, Said suggested that, Because Williamss Anglocentrism is so pronounced and stubborn a theme in his work, because of that we can distinguish and differentiate the other ethnocentrisms with which his work in geographical and historical terms interacts contrapuntally (1990b, 83). Even if Saids way of locating Williams as Anglocentric involves the familiar blurring of English and British identities and overlooks Williamss very speciWcally Welsh formation, it offers pointers toward linking the local and the global, pointers that the later reXections on imaginative geographies of empire and its aftermaths in Culture and Imperialism were to multiply.13 A further, fourth signiWcant Marxist relationship requiring note is that with cultural theorist Theodor Adorno, who is a recurring reference point in Saids later writings. Adorno is not discussed in Beginnings or The World, the Text, and the Critic, nor indeed is he mentioned in the trilogy of Orientalism, The Question of Palestine, and Covering Islam (after all, Adornos relationship to non-European cultures was one of sublime indifference, rather than active, orientalist engagement). In Saids writings of the 1980s and 1990s, however, Adorno Wgures ever more frequently, especially in the work on music, naturally enough, for Adorno had been in Saids eyes one of the few great practitioners of the kind of synthesizing musical analysis, drawing in formal, philosophical, social, and political strands that Said himself sought to practice. Beyond music, Adorno, his ethnocentrism aside, could really talk about anything, everything, as Said glowingly asserted (1992b, 243). Adorno became for him a model of the modern intellectual both in positive waysin his sheer rangeand in negative ones. For much of Adornos messagehis cultural conservatism, his
71
increasing disengagement from active politics, his gloomy conviction that musics former liberatory potential had been lost (see Adorno 1973), that there was no longer a social space in which it could operate, above all Adornos overarching pessimismwas alien to Said. Thus time after timethroughout Musical Elaborations, at scattered points in Culture and Imperialism and its associated essays, in his essay On Fidelio (1997), above all in a published lecture on Adornos work and the idea of late style (1995a)Saids engagement has been both admiring and critical. He notes that in musical scholarship such connections between art and social form have, despite distinguished exceptions, not often been made; nor has enough attention been paid to social and political determinants in musicology. Very few people have written about music as, say, Williams wrote about literature, or Foucault about the history of disciplines (1991, xvi). There has been a general failure since Adorno to connect formal musical analysis to ideology, or social space, or power, or to the formation of an individual (and by no means sovereign) ego (xvii). And Adornos own work on music cannot, for all Saids admiration for it, provide him with a model; not only are Adornos elitism and his sweeping disdain for all vernacular forms unacceptable to him but so is his crude (if not always consistently adhered to) view that since the heroic era around the First World War there has in the Western classical tradition been nothing more than a history of decline, a retrogression into the traditional (Adorno 1973, 5). It is, in sum, hard to speak of a direct Adornian inXuence in any of Saids major worksexcept those dealing speciWcally with musicdespite the numerous gestures of praise. Rather, there are similarities or afWnities (on which see further Varadharajan 1995; Hussein 2002, 23235).14 There is moreover almost no active engagement in Saids work with Frankfurt School thinkers other than Adorno, or indeed with contemporary German thought in generalthis has echoes of Orientalisms much-criticized neglect of German orientalists. It is surprising, for instance, to Wnd no reference to Habermas anywhere in Saids writing, and very few to Benjamin. If critical but often affectionate encounters with certain key Wgures in Western MarxismAdorno, Gramsci, Lukcs, Williamswas one major strand in Saids thought as it interrelated with Marxism, another operated in a largely discrete, parallel fashion and in mostly quite distinct parts of his work, perhaps surprisingly so given his own
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emphasis on contrapuntal readings. This was his interest in (and, unlike the situation with academic Western Marxism, active gestures of political afWliation to) radical thought in the decolonizing and postcolonial world, including the very large Marxist presence in such thought. In the 1992 interview already quoted, where he laid out his attitudes toward Marxism in unusually explicit fashion, Said was critical of those like Perry Anderson who in his view identiWed Marxism almost entirely with that Western tradition, and speciWcally faulted the lack of attention to Third World Marxisms (1992b, 25859).15 In tracing the story of Third World radicalismas he does most extensively in Culture and ImperialismSaid begins with allusions to the earlier primary resistance movements and millenarian revolts against colonialism, raisingthough refusing decisively to resolve the question of whether these should be seen mostly as negative, backward-looking reactions to European modernity or as precursors of modern nationalism (1993a, 23539). He suggests, too simply, that which perspective one chooses will depend primarily on who one is, whether one identiWes with the West or the Third World (239). The deeper problems with Saids account of these matters lie, though, in the developmental succession he proclaims: from colonial to postcolonial intellectuals, from nationalism to liberation. Saids later work moved ever more decisively, though in inconsistent and untheorized ways, toward celebrating or emphasizing recuperation of the voices of the colonized, the anticolonialist, and the postcolonial. On one level this may be seen as a generalization across the Third World of claims initially made in the Palestinian context, claims for the capacity and power of the marginalized to construct their own narratives, to tell their own tales (see Said 1980; 1984b). On another it is an extended rejoinder to those critics who had complained that in Orientalism the power to speak is monopolized by the colonizer. As Said himself says, What I left out of Orientalism was that response to Western dominance which culminated in the great movement of decolonization all across the Third World (1993a, xii). Culture and Imperialism and Saids other writing from the mid-1980s on remedy that defect by discussing various kinds of anticolonialism in some depth, though many of the later books own shortcomings cluster around this theme. In the process, a kind of countercanon is constructed. In one place a list is given of the Indian subaltern studies historians, Salman Rushdie,
73
Gabriel Garca Mrquez, George Lamming, Sergio Ramirez, Ngugi Wa Thiongo, Faiz Ahmad Faiz, Mahmud Darwish, Aim Csaire, Frantz Fanon, Amilcar Cabral, Syed Hussein Alatas, C. L. R. James, Ali Shariati, Eqbal Ahmad, Abdullah Laroui, and Omar Cabezas (Said 1988a, ixx). Very many of the otherwise notably heterogeneous Third World writers and activists thus listed were in some sense or for some part of their careers self-avowed Marxists. Within this pantheon, a few Wgures particularly stand out: James, whose work has a special importance for my own (Said 1992a; see also 1989b); Csaire; and above all Fanon. The latter pair are, as types, held up to be models or representations of human effort in the contemporary world (Said 1989a, 22425; and see 1988b, 8, 1617, 20). As Henry Louis Gates grumbles, this means that Said, having called for a recognition of the situatedness of all discourses, then presents Fanon as a global theorist in vacuo . . . emptied of his own speciWcity (Gates 1991, 459). The same desire to produce a politically usable past may account for Saids forced reading of Yeats, and on a wider scale for the somewhat Manichaean interpretations of Middle East politics into which he has frequently and no doubt understandably in his more polemical moods slipped. These tendencies are in constant tension with the more careful, nuanced mode of much of his other writing, a mode in which he will recognize profound shortcomings in Arab, and Palestinian, political culture (e.g., 1993a, 3045, 36162; 2001) or express considerable skepticism about all nationalist projects. Evidently enough, such simple stages theories cannot provide an adequate general explanation for the relationship between colonialism, anticolonial nationalism, and other ideologies either more inclusive (Saids politics of liberation) or less so (racism, nativism, tribalism, communalism). Quite likely they do not work even for any one particular case. We need to specify far more closely the particular forms and trajectories of politics and consciousness in each individual colonial or postcolonial situation. This must include close investigation of the ways in which communal or sectarian politics are created and mobilized. And these colonial and postcolonial discourse theories since Said too often have utterly failed to do. Once again, Saids central complaint about orientalist thoughtthat it establishes dichotomizing, essentializing, overly abstract categories of humanity and
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uses these in the pursuit of particular political projectscan be turned back with equal justice against much postcolonial oppositional theory. And major parts of Saids own work, though certainly by no means all of it, share that crucial fault. Moreover, Saids list of places where the larger search for liberation has been strongestsupposedly those where the nationalist accomplishment had been either checked or greatly delayedis odd and even seems rather arbitrary, like so many of his listings of authorities or events. It comprises Algeria, Guinea, Palestine, sections of the Islamic and Arab world, and South Africa (1993a, 264). The omission of India, surely among the most productive sites of postcolonial liberationist thought of every kind, is extraordinary. There seems, by contrast, no very evident reason to privilege Algeria or Palestine, except that they are cases with which Said is especially familiar. And if by Guinea is meant Guine-Bissau, as is probable (for to make such a claim about the tyrannized intellectual wastelands of exFrench Guinea or Equatorial Guinea would be sadly grotesque), this can only be on the tenuous grounds of Amilcar Cabrals solitary eminence in its nationalist movement. All this writing, Said suggests, has had a distinctively combative edge even when framed in the genres of academic scholarship. This is because these writers think of themselves as emissaries to Western culture representing a political freedom and accomplishment as yet unfulWlled, blocked, postponed (312). Oppositional, postcolonial writings do not merely comment on anticolonial struggles, they belong squarely in the contest itself (313). The locus classicus of many of these postcolonial themesof resistance, nativism, and liberation; of scholarship and engagement; of the meanings of colonial and anticolonial violencehas been interrogation of Frantz Fanons legacy.16 Thus it is appropriate that Said concludes his longest discussion of anticolonial cultures of resistance by an extended engagement with Fanons thought. As he says, Fanons importance for his case lies in his having more dramatically and decisively than anyone expressed the immense cultural shift from the terrain of nationalist independence to the theoretical domain of liberation (1993a, 324). Saids discussion of Fanon has many notable strengths, including important suggestions on his relations to Hegel, Marx, Freud, and, less familiarly, intriguing speculations about his afWliations with Lukcs
75
(1993a, 32627; see also 1999, where the admittedly speculative argument about Fanons debt to Lukcs is considerably elaborated). Yet arguably he not only dehistoricizes and decontextualizes Fanons work, as Gates had suggested, casting him as prophetic genius (328) but, even in all his stress on the complexity of Fanons thought, he ends up producing a Fanon radically remodeled to suit his own purposes. For many of the ideas against which Said had polemicized in nationalist thought can be found also in Fanon, and these Said slides past in silence. Although Fanon himself had of course never been a pure or simple nationalist, let alone what Said calls a nativist, there are far more, and more powerful, currents of identitarian and cultural nationalist rhetoric in Fanons work (mainly, but far from only, the earlier work) than Said allows. Such identitarian rhetoricswhether or not we can see Fanon as later breaking decisively with themtend, as Said stresses, to reproduce essentialized images of the West just as routinely, and as misleadingly, as they do those of the Orient, the colonial subject, and so on. Sometimes the creation of self-referring myths is explicit; nowhere more so than in the long tradition of writing about a phantasmic America; whether this imagined space is deplored or celebrated. In many eyes, including it often seemed Saids own, this fault was especially prevalent in the Arab and Islamic worlds. The stakes in debate here, and their relationship to Marxism, may well be illustrated by reference to two other Arab scholars who have both related intimately to Marxism and engaged closely and critically with Saids work: Syrian Sadiq Jalal al-Azm and Palestinian Hisham Sharabi. In his Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse, al-Azm makes two especially important, closely related criticisms of Said, apart from also raising many of the same complaints on issues like epistemological ambiguity that other critics have raised. First, Said fails to identify the really crippling fault of many of the writers he analyzes and attacks, which is their profoundly ahistorical frame of mind (al-Azm 1984, 359). They illegitimately (and, al-Azm underlines in agreement with Said, usually for reasons much to do with political agendas) go on from generally accurate observations about past sociopsychological patterns to make such claims as that the Unseen was always (and always will be) more immediate and real to the Orientals than to the Western peoples past, present, and future (359). Indeed some
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orientalists whom Said singles out for unusual praise, like Massignon, were in al-Azms view far more guilty of this tendency than others whom Said comprehensively denounces. Al-Azms second main charge is that Said underrates and, in his procedures and emphases, indeed tends to encourage an Orientalism in reverse by which non-Western thinkers (al-Azm, like Said, has Arab and Islamic ones mainly in mind) produce essentializing, ahistorical, and wildly misleading images of cultural difference, sometimes self-denigrating ones, sometimes self-glorifying. These are, alAzm suggests, just as pervasive and as damaging, as reactionary, mystifying, ahistorical, and anti-human (376) as Western ones have been and are indeed largely derivative of the latter (36871). Al-Azms critique is, in fact, not so far distant from some of Saids own emphases as might be thought. One aspect of the Orientalism in reverse that al-Azm castigates, the lack of curiosity or sustained investigation of the West in contemporary Arab and Muslim worlds and the consequent often basic misunderstandings of European, U.S., or indeed Israeli societies, has frequently been highlighted in Saids writings. How far has Marxist thought in the Arab world provided exceptions to this dispiriting picture? As Hisham Sharabilike Said, a Palestinian scholar long resident in the United Statesargued, Arab feminist cultural critique has been far bolder than that of oppositional Arab intellectuals in its confrontation with received theoretical models, including Marxism. Yet, although orthodox Marxism in the Arab world has been (as Said too has repeatedly complained) a pretty arid, derivative, and formulaic affair, a more diffuse Marxist inXuence has had more creative consequences. Many of the most impressive critical voices in Arab social thought, Wgures like al-Azm, Barakat, Khatibi, Laroui, Mernissi, and Sharabi, owe a great deal to Marxist theory and sometimes to a speciWcally Marxist initial intellectual formation, even if few of them would in their later, most inXuential work describe themselves unequivocally as Marxists. Poststructuralist, postmodernist, and deconstructive thought have had their inXuence in Arab intellectual circles, too; as one might expect, such inXuence is most marked in the Maghrebian countries where French cultural presence is strongest. They include theorists like Muhammad Arkoun, whose main focus has been on a critique of religious thought heavily inXuenced by Foucault, Heidegger, and Castoriadis (Arkoun
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1984; 1985), and Moroccan Abdelkabir Khatibi (1983; 1985). Khatibis deployment of deconstructive and poststructuralist concepts is intended to mount a dual challenge: a double criticism against both the traditionalist Arab social thought which Sharabi (1988) called neopatriarchal, and the essentially imitative appropriations among Arab intellectuals of mainstream Western social science (in which Khatibi would include the uses and abuses of Marxism). Such critical approaches in Middle Eastern contexts do not only face the general difWculties of cross-cultural translation but, as Sharabi and others have argued, may encounter under the conditions of Arab political culture an intensiWed version of poststructuralisms political double-bind. That is, on the one hand the critics tend to adopt a highly didactic, politically polemical tone that, owing much to the frequently overheated rhetorical nature of contemporary Arab debate, necessarily delimits the horizon of theory by often imposing prescriptive considerations (Sharabi 1988, 122). On the other hand, paradoxically and yet more damagingly, the tendencies of poststructuralist and postmodernist thought, both formalistic and atomizing, rob it of real political effects, all the more so in Arab contexts where, as Sharabi urges, a view of social totality, seeking to unite fragmented oppositions, is needed: What is the point of naming the oppressed, the marginalized, the humiliated, if the enterprise stops at an abstract gesture? . . . If, in the context of late industrial society, post-structuralist anarchism provides the illusion of the play of freedom and plurality, the primary need in authoritarian neopatriarchal society goes beyond anarchisms delight in deconstructive plays . . . deconstructive criticism ends up being a fragmented project unable to provide clear political purpose (12324). The congruence between these preoccupations and Saidsnot least in a shared concern at the political consequences of much contemporary radical theorywill be obvious. More orthodox or traditional forms of Marxism in the Middle East, however, have in most analysts eyes (including, again, Saids) been considerably more sterile still. Much of this Arab (or indeed Iranian, Turkish, Israeli, and other) Marxism, and certainly those parts that caught Saids eye, was highly activist rather than academic or theoreticist, and closely linked to the programs of communist and other left parties in the region. Its contribution in terms of sustained or original social analysis was extremely limited. The crude and skin-deep
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(Sayigh 1997, 23237) Marxism of the Palestinian Popular Front, for instance, fully justiWed Saids judgment that Marxism in the Arab world did not go beyond Russian models of the 1920s and 1930s (1992b, 26061). In some more restricted senses, however, Saids view was perhaps unfairly bleak. In particular, his repeated emphasis on the failure of Palestinians effectively to represent themselves, to present authoritative narratives of their own past, greatly underestimated the achievement of increasingly numerous Palestinian (and indeed leftish Israeli) social historians, many of them strongly Marxist inXuenced, in constructing such narratives and presenting an ever more detailed picture of Palestinian peasant and other nonelite pasts. Even if he thus seemed surprisingly indifferent to certain kinds of Palestinian historical narrative, Said nonetheless appeared ever more convinced that narrative as such had a central politico-ethical value. Already in Orientalism he had suggestednot entirely consistently with much else in the bookthat the very idea of narrative, of telling a story, as opposed to a static, panoptic vision, undermines orientalisms essentializing and denigrating ideas about non-Western peoples. If this seems inconsistent with the insistence, in Culture and Imperialism and elsewhere, on the power of some kinds of narrative (like those of Victorian European novels) to sustain and further imperialist systems, then that contradiction may be resolved by making explicit what I think Said implies: that it is speciWcally historical narrative that has these potentially liberating functions. Saids turn against Foucault, against contemporary literary theory, and against poststructuralist and postmodernist visions is thus in the end above all a turn to history, both in the sense of attention to the complex, changing, detail of human experience and in the sense that narratives of historical change can (or, Said seems sometimes to imply, against the academic spirit of the age, necessarily do) carry messages of progress and emancipation. In that, he came very close once more to classical Marxist themes and beliefs, especially those that posed Marxism as key heir to the Enlightenment. For Said, like Adorno but unlike Foucault and unlike many of the later colonial discourse theorists, the intellectual still hasor could havea degree of autonomy from political power. Said insists, then, on the importance of the individual authors responsibility. She or he can choose to write and act in politically responsible and emancipatory
79
ways. The institutions of academia and intellectual production are not inherently bound to the service of imperialism, though they can choose to betray their true avocation and become its servantsand in the United States, he says, they usually have done so. Such subordination will then mean that the knowledge produced from these sites is imperialist, obfuscatory, and oppressive. But that comes from the institutional or personal choice, not (at least in the main) from the inherent limits of discourse itself. Indeed, Said frequently describes the process by which false, distorting, and oppressive images of the Other are generated in distinctly materialist and even instrumentalist terms, with reference to patterns of media ownership, governmental, business, and military funding of academia and research foundations, the material beneWts to be gained from conformity, and so on (1978, 284 302, 32125; 1982; 1990a, 79). Again, this distances him quite sharply both from such mentors as Adorno and Foucault, and from subsequent theorists who are more despairing about the possibilities of effective resistance, and more single-mindedly textualist, than Said has been. Said is surely right to urge that resistance cannot equally be an adversarial alternative to power and a dependent function of it, except in some metaphysical, ultimately trivial sense (1984a, 246). And he is right, against many of those who have been most inXuenced by him. In his most politically engaged texts, especially those concerned with contemporary events and above all those on Palestinian questions, Said goes further, wholly abandoning the poststructuralist and textualist ground to mount arguments of a straightforwardly realist, even empiricist kind. He will in such registers argue: The starkest media reality, I believe, is that evidence or news or fact is assumed to be true or false mainly on the basis of who says it (1987a, 10). It is here taken for granted that this is a deplorable state of affairs; whereas he had seemed to many critics to be adopting a stance very like that himself in Orientalism. That strand of Saids thought and of his political engagement is a sign, perhaps, of the most central, enduring, if largely subterranean impact of Marxism on him. It is certainly an indicator that his proclaimed anti-anti-Marxism indicated something more substantive than a mere gesture of refusal. For, in a great deal of contemporary postcolonialist theoretical and culturalist writing, what proclaims
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itself as post-Marxist is often, more simply, anti-Marxist. The nearinescapable other side of that coin is that criticism of such theorizing (except where the critic is self-proclaimedly reactionary) is simply assumed to be proceeding from Marxistor rather, vulgar Marxist premises. This has all too often meant a crude homogenizing of the multiple strands of Marxist thought into a single set of claims, for which such phrases as modes of production narrative are routinely used, and which is supposed without argument or proof to be outdated or superseded (whether by the coming of the postmodern or the collapse of the Soviet Union).17 And, in parallel fashion, what calls itself the postcolonial is often, rhetorically and sentimentally, wanting to announce its anticolonialism, with the consequence that accounts skeptical of its particular protocols or assertions are taken to be and denounced asapologetics for colonialism. Sudipta Kaviraj (1992, 95) is perhaps right to argue that classical Marxists typically tended to hail too uncritically the penetration of a superWcial, predatory travesty of capitalism into the colonial world and to overestimate that capitalisms capacity to remake traditional rural societies. But conversely, much contemporary radical Third Worldist theory (though not, on the whole, Kavirajs own work) swings to the opposite extreme on both counts. Orthodox Soviet Marxism became deeply marked by its encounter with Third Worldism and with a romanticor Slavophilenotion of cultural essences. This produced two contradictory tendencies, often both held in permanent tension within the same minds and political discourses: an economistic and progressivist modes of production narrative and a romantic culturalism. Some contemporary postcolonial and Third Worldist political thought, drawing eclectic comfort from fragments of postmodernist and poststructural theory, has identiWed the Wrst of these as the original sin of Western socialismwith which it has identiWed Marxism. In fact this tendency had quite different and more Eastern roots, some of which can be traced to Lenins thought and the speciWcally Russian inXuences on it (see Shanin 1986, 2:279305). And far more potent, and more damaging to emancipatory politics, has been the second tendency: romanticism and culturalism operating, often half-hidden but hegemonic, within socialist and Marxist thought, especially thought in, and about, the postcolonial world. In other words, what Third Worldist cultural nationalists and their more
81
modish successors, postmodernist culturalists, have identiWed as the great error of Marxismits supposed imperializing rationalismhas actually not been the dominant strand of Marxism in the Third World. There, as in Western colonialism itself, it has been romantic nationalism that has prevailed and been responsible for most of the errors and crimes now conventionally laid to rationalisms account. Edward Saids work returned repeatedly, and with repeated ambivalence, to these issues and dilemmas. Insofar as his Wnal message lay on the rationalist, universalist, and humanist side of the great division, then we might say that much that was best in his work was, in the end, at one with the best parts of the Marxist intellectual tradition.
Notes
1. It should perhaps also be noted that the quoted passage from Brennan is not typical of this critics acute and subtle discussions of Saids work and inXuence. 2. The shift can be followed in the pattern of Saids work as a book reviewer. At the outset of his career, in the late 1960s, his published reviews were almost all of literary and philosophical works. By the 1980s almost all the subjects were political ones, mainly on the Middle East; though he continued occasionally to review literary works (especially by Arab writers) and, increasingly, books on music. 3. Abdirahman Hussein suggests that the essays in The World, the Text, and the Critic mark a distinct shift toward engagement with and inXuences from Marxism: a mid-career stock-taking [which] involves a shift of emphasis from structuralisty/poststructuralist thought to Marxism (2002, 158). 4. Saids approving appropriation of the secular label has, near inevitably, brought down charges that he risks assuming the nineteenth century mantle of progress and enlightenment (Brennan 1992, 92) or of forgetting how the very idea of secularism is a product of Europe and thus (in what is by now an overfamiliar complaint) perhaps arrogantly particularist if not implicitly colonialist. Some admirers of Said have, perhaps for these reasons, preferred to emphasize another term he sometimes uses to capture much of the same complex of ideas, that is, worldly criticism (see especially Ashcroft and Ahluwalia 1999; Brennan 1997). For an extended argument that Saids notion of secularism is ambiguous and inconsistent, and his own work suffused with unavowed or displaced religious themes, see William D. Harts 2000 book. 5. It has occasionally been suggested (e.g., Richardson 1990, 1718) that in thus shifting the locus of Marxs comment Said was making a depoliticizing or even a dishonest move. This is clearly unfairalthough it might still be said that such charges stick in relation to much subsequent, Said-inXuenced writing in colonial cultural studies, which does tend to reduce all politics to a matter of contending cultural representations.
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6. Said 1978, 1536. Among many critiques of Saids treatment of Marx on India, see for instance Nimtz 2002 and Jani 2002. 7. See, for instance, the critique in Lazarus 1999, 13940. Still, Said here as in so many contexts makes a far less extreme case than some of those claiming inspiration from him have done. For an argument that the only true anticolonialists were a few great imaginative writers, see Kiberd 1995. 8. Throughout the book and associated writings Said is also silently rejectingindeed never once refers tothe Leninist deWnition of imperialism as being, or appertaining to, a particular stage in capitalist development. Whatever the nuances of Saids relationship to Marxism, he has nothing in common with post1917 orthodox communist theories of imperialism. 9. For an example of Gramscis continuing importance for Said near the end of his life, see his presentation of the Italians ideas to Palestinian students at Bir Zeit in 1998: he avowed that he belong(ed) to the school of Gramsci in his belief in the centrality of ideological struggle (Said 1998). Valerie Kennedy discusses Saids relationship to Gramsci at some length (2000, 3137), but her account is vitiated by a misreading of the Gramscian concept of hegemony as referring to one states, rather than one classs, domination over another. 10. The latter allusion is presumably mainly to Leopardi, especially as interpreted by Sebastiano Timpanaro. 11. This essay, originally addressed to an Egyptian audience, is probably Saids longest single engagement with Marxist writers (Raymond Williams also features heavily in it). See also his Invention, Memory, and Place (2000a), which links defense of obscured and mutilated memory against the claims of invented tradition and ofWcial history with another insistence on the centrality of a sense of place and of space in critical social theory. 12. Whether or how far Williams should be regarded as a Marxist is a complex, perhaps again not intrinsically important, but not uninteresting matter, on which there is now an argumentative literature too substantial to be cited here. His earlier work takes a clear critical distance from Marxism, but the relationship becomes closer and more afWrmative in his writing from the early 1970s on. 13. It is a little hard to see, however, why Timothy Brennan (2000, 569; 2001, 90) should argue that Williams, far more than Foucault, is the key inXuence on Orientalism. The inXuence is certainly there, and Brennan is a closer reader of Saids work than almost any other commentator on it, but there are only two passing references to Williams in Orientalism, neither of them to The Country and the City the work suggested to have been Saids main source. The direct engagement with Williamss writings only comes rather later in Saids career. 14. Perhaps surprisingly, Asha Varadharajan (1995) has made an extended attempt to employ Adornos thought (which she believes Said has used in a tendentious, indeed, reductive style [130]) as a basis for negative, if nuanced and respectful, criticism of Saids. A more afWrmative linking of the two theorists is made in Dallmayr 1997. 15. In this, Said somewhat misunderstood Andersons argument, which at
83
that stage in his own intellectual trajectory was far more afWrmative toward the classical Marxist tradition, especially in its Trotskyist variant, than toward the Western one; although it is true that, then and later, Anderson almost entirely neglected nonNorth Atlantic thought. In what follows I use the term Third World despite its now apparent semi-obsolescence, since it (more than, say, postcolonial) is so much used by the writers alluded to, including Said himself. 16. Fanons relationship to Marxism is little less complex, and little if any less debated, than that involved in Williamss longer career. Again the debate cannot be summarized or even referenced here, but it may fairly uncontroversially be said that Fanons thought was considerably more Marxist in his last book than in his Wrst. 17. A strong case can be made, on the basis especially of Marxs scattered comments on Russian development in his last years, for arguing that even if a unilinear story of world development is inherent in his major work, he had substantially rethought and at least partly rejected that stance before the end (see Shanin 1984).
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. 1971b. Molestation and the Authority of Narrative Fiction. In Aspects of Narrative, ed. J. Hillis Miller, 4768. New York: Columbia University Press. . 1972. Michel Foucault as an Intellectual Imagination. boundary 2 1:136. . 1973. United States Policy and the ConXict of Powers in the Middle East. Journal of Palestine Studies 2, no. 3: 3050. . 1975a. Beginnings: Intention and Method. New York: Basic. . 1975b. Shattered Myths. In Middle East Crucible, ed. Naseer H. Aruri, 40847. Wilmette, Ill.: Medina University Press. . 1976a. Interview. Diacritics 6, no. 3: 3047. . 1976b. Between Chance and Determinism: Lukcs Aesthetik. Times Literary Supplement. February 6. Reprinted in 2000c. . 1976c. Vico on the Discipline of Bodies and Texts. Modern Language Notes 91:81726. . 1978. Orientalism. London: Routledge. . 1980. The Question of Palestine. London: Routledge. . 1982. Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies, and Community. Critical Inquiry 9, no. 1: 126. . 1984a. The World, the Text, and the Critic. London: Faber. Published in the United States 1983. . 1984b. Permission to Narrate. London Review of Books. February 1629. . 1984c. Michel Foucault, 19271984. Raritan 4, no. 2: 111. . 1986a. The Burdens of Interpretation and the Question of Palestine. Journal of Palestine Studies 61:2937. . 1986b. Foucault and the Imagination of Power. In Foucault: a Critical Reader, ed. David Couzens Hoy, 14955. Oxford: Blackwell. . 1986c. Media, Margins, and Modernity: Raymond Williams and Edward Said. Edited transcript of discussion at the Institute of Education, London, published in Raymond Williams, The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformism, 17797. London: Verso, 1989. . 1987a. Irangate. London Review of Books. May 7. . 1987b. Interview. In Criticism in Society, ed. Imre Salusinszky, 12048. New York: Methuen. . 1988a. Foreword. In Selected Subaltern Studies, ed. Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, vx. Oxford: Oxford University Press. . 1988b. Yeats and Decolonization. Derry, Ireland: Field Day pamphlet. Revised version published in 1993a. . 1988c. Conspiracy of Praise. In Blaming the Victims, ed. Edward Said and Christopher Hitchens, 2332. London: Verso. . 1989a. Representing the Colonized: Anthropologys Interlocutors. Critical Inquiry 15, no. 2: 20525. . 1989c. C. L. R. James: The Artist as Revolutionary. New Left Review 175:12628. . 1990a. Figures, ConWgurations, TransWgurations. Race and Class 32, no. 1: 116.
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EDWARD SAID AND MARXISM

EDWARD SAID AND MARXISM

EDWARD SAID AND MARXISM

EDWARD SAID AND MARXISM

EDWARD SAID AND MARXISM

EDWARD SAID AND MARXISM

EDWARD SAID AND MARXISM

EDWARD SAID AND MARXISM

EDWARD SAID AND MARXISM

EDWARD SAID AND MARXISM

EDWARD SAID AND MARXISM

EDWARD SAID AND MARXISM

EDWARD SAID AND MARXISM

EDWARD SAID AND MARXISM

EDWARD SAID AND MARXISM

EDWARD SAID AND MARXISM

EDWARD SAID AND MARXISM

EDWARD SAID AND MARXISM

EDWARD SAID AND MARXISM

EDWARD SAID AND MARXISM

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