Edward Said’s Late Style
There is a growing and flagrant paradox about Orientalism.
With the years, the book seems to have been endowed with a life of its own, divorced from the rest of its author’s life and intellectual development. More,
Edward Said’s masterpiece is too often read and presented in contradistinction with the author’s subsequent intellectual development, reduced to the couple knowledge/power and representation and hijacked by at least three tendencies: a) dominant trends in post-colonial studies, b) local nativists in several Arab and Islamic countries; c) cultural and social parvenus in the Arab World objecting to the way the Arabs and Muslims are ‘represented in the West’.
- Three Moments in Said’s Orientalism
I want here to situate Orientalism in relation to the intellectual development of its author and the subsequent corrections he made to his major early work; that is tantamount to placing Said himself in time and place.
I propose that there are three moments in Said’s intellectual development that proceeded contrapunctually – as he would have liked to say.
1. Critique of Orientalism constitutes the first moment. The book Orientalism, published now thirty five years ago, is a critical history of a discipline which claims monopoly over interpreting and representing things Eastern, to Westerners and Easterners alike, intimately linked to, and contaminated by, the interests, strategies and policies of Euro-American imperialism.
However, Said’s archival documentation engages authors, politicians and belles-lettrists who have made a large contribution to the Western creation of the essence ‘East’ and thus creating itself also as the essence ‘West’. Said brilliant and trenchant arguments reveal a number of dogmas that dominated Orientalist discourses.
– Essentialism: East and West are two fixed and mutually exclusive essences not without hierarchy (one is rational, developed, humane, the other spiritual, irrational, underdeveloped and inferior);
– Generalization: each particular part of the Orient tells about the whole Orient and vice versa;
– Stereotyping: e.g., Arabs and Muslims are irrational; pre-Newtonian (the real world almost completely internal to the Oriental observer) etc.;
– The Orient is unchanging;
– The Orient is unique: there is only one religion, one Islamic society; one Arab mind one Arab psyche, one Arab-Islamic culture, etc.;
– Culturalism: Orientals are defined and determined by their culture, generally reduced to their Muslim religion (Said, 2003a: 24-48).
Said concludes with two intriguing warnings, one against the ‘modern Orient… participating in its own Orientalizing’ and another warning that ‘the answer to Orientalism is not Occidentalism.’ (Said, 2003a: 328)
To be Orientalized would imply internalizing the dominant Orientalist discourses by Orientals.
Occidentalism, on the other hand, has been often brushed aside as it is not in harmony with a certain politically correct attitude vis-a-vis things eastern and Islamic by champions of anti-orientalism. You don’t criticize the victim at least not from the countries were he is being victimized. Still the victim has to deal with his own version of Orientalism: Occidentalism, which constitutes the dominant view on the west in his/her part of the world (in which the discourses of orientalism form a part, but not the whole).
Said, sees Occidentalism as an insufficient reactive set of notions that accept the basic East-West essentialist divide while at the same time revaluating the weaker and subservient partner in the persisting and reconstructed imperialist relations of domination and control.
This is one meaning. In line with Said analysis and critique of orientalism, Occidentalism, as a mirror-image of Orientalism, is contaminated by power – local and imperial economic, political and cultural power – and incapable of producing adequate knowledge about itself and its object – the imperialist West – a failure that weakens, if not aborts, the liberation struggle of the colonized peoples and societies or delivers them to neo-imperialist domination.
The critique of Occidentalism is the intellectual theme of the second moment of the development of Said thought.
2. Culture and Imperialism (1994) opens the second moment in Edward Said’s thought. It corrects and complements Orientalism all the while presenting a critique of Occidentalism, in the form of some of the various ideologies by which the colonized have waged their struggles against colonialism.
Said had already taken his distances from Foucault whom he criticized him for “neglecting the role of economics, the role of insurgency and rebellion in the societies he discusses” (Said, 1983: 244). Colonialism, he asserted, is also and primarily about “control of oversea markets, raw materials, cheap labor, and highly profitable land” (Said, 1994: 13-14). In addition, Said critiqued Occidentosis – the tendency to blame all ills on the West- and rejected conspiracy theories.
Nuanced in his critique of nationalism, Said joins Frantz Fanon in calling for the transformation of national consciousness -in post-colonial societies- into social consciousness, by achieving the transition from national liberation to social liberation and change. However it is nativism that appears to Said as the more problematic aspect of Occidentalism:
“…to accept nativism is to accept the consequences of imperialism the racial, religious and political divisions imposed by imperialism itself. To leave the historical world for the metaphysics of essence like negritude, Irishness, Islam or Catholicism is to abandon history for essentializations that have the power to turn human beings against each other” (Said, 1994: 276)
As if to leave no room for any misinterpretation of his position, in his posthumously published Humanism and Democratic Critique, Said agrees with James Clifford’s critique that his book Orientalism which “relapses into the essentializing modes it attacks’ (Said, 2003b, p 8-9). Finally, the couple East-West, with its domination, hegemony and resistances, is subsumed in a call for the ‘discovery of a world not constructed out of warring essences’.
3. Secular democratic critique and the humanist outlook mark the third moment of Edward Said’s thought based on the belief that men make their own history and that the real world is the main object of knowledge. Those are the writings of his late years, including Humanism and Democratic critique, Out of Place and most importantly On Late Style.
To start with, here is his devastating critique of identitarian and culturalist problematics and politics in his On Late Style. Commenting on the writings of Jean Genet, Said writes “
“Identity is what we impose on ourselves through our lives as social, historical, political and even spiritual beings. The logic of culture and of families doubles the strength of identity, which to someone like Genet who was a victim of the identity forced on him by his deliquency, his isolation, and his transgressive talents and delights- is something to be opposed. Above all, given Genet’s choice of sites like Algeria and Palestine, identity is the process by which the stronger culture, and the more developed society, imposes itself violently upon those who, by the same identity process, are decreed to be of a lesser people. Imperialism is the export of identity” (Said, 2006:85).
II. Edward Said’s Late Style
Said has completed what I consider the late stage of his intellectual production and development. In it he has chosen authors, interpreters and composers in his own image so to speak.
Let me quote Gaston Bachelard’s in his Surrationnalisme to illustrate my point:
“We must redeem to human reason its function of turbulence/subversion and aggressiveness… If in an experience we do not risk one’s sanity, that experience is not worth participating in it. On the other hand, to risk one’s sanity should be total. Its specific character to be total. All or nothing. Each genuine discovery determines a new method. It must ruin an earlier method. In other words, in the realm of thought, impudence [cocky boldness/intellectual insolence] is a method… We must rush the fastest we can into the realms of intellectual impudence.” (Gaston Bachelard: Le Surrationalisme.)
[Exact reference/pages of quotation]
Impudence
I do not know whether Said read the above paragraph by Bachelard, but it tells us a lot about him and his own late style: Intellectual impudence. That is Said all his life. Rushing in as fast as he can into the realms of intellectual impudence – this is Edward’s late style.
Said is primarily a literary critic: whereas in his early work, Said initiated a critical method which reads social change and relations of power (colonialism) into literary works, not only novels (see his pages on Yeats), On Late Style (2006) now seems to revert the process and illuminate Said’s readings of literary texts by putting them into social and historical context.
‘On Late Style’ is about authors who are Out of place
Late style is differentiated from maturity “not as harmony and resolution, but as intransigence, difficulty and unresolved contradiction” (Said 2006, p.?).
On Late Style is furthermore about subversion. It is a text that runs ‘against the grain”, for Said, “lateness is the idea of surviving beyond what is acceptable”. All the authors and composers he writes about in the book are chosen among those who, like him, are ‘out of place’. Take Adorno, his ‘lateness’ is defined as “ending [one’s life and work]without illusory hope or manufactured resignation” (Said 2006, p. 24).
Lateness is about Time
Mozart and Lampedusa/Visconti (the former’s novel The Leopard made into film by the latter): here late style is set against a background of the crumbling of old regimes in Europe.
In the Italy of the 19th century Risorgimento, The Leopard is an epic novel/film about social disintegration, the failure of revolution and the misery of the peasants where Said resorts to Gramsci’s depiction of to illustrate that process of this disintegration.
On Late Style is all about TIME, but all the time Said evading and ruling out “sentimentality and nostalgia” ( 2006, p.107)
Now we could also read the chapter “A Lingering Old Order”, while thinking about the present Arab revolutions in the background.
Visconti’s film ends with the aristocracy contracting matrimonial alliance with the new bourgeoisie that will guarantee its survival (Said 2006, p.112). Today, our lingering old order in which the remnants of the new state bourgeoisie of nationalist dictatorships and oil-gas oligarchs are trying to guarantee their survival as they are wed to the culturalists and implacably neo-liberal Islamists, crushing the Arab peoples’ aspiration to “bread, freedom, and social justice” in the name of the holy alliance waging an international permanent holy war against terrorism, led by the armies of Bashshar al-Assad, Ali Muhsin al-Ahmar of Yemen, with Egypt’s Sissi presenting arms in Sinai; the ceremony attended in full dress by best men: new cold war warriors represented by the muthanna (now this is a muthanna) Keery-Lavrov, the ailing king Abdallah, the gasoil new young Tamim, king of Qatar, and a host of invitees from Britain, Iran, France, Germany, you name them: they all were there.
Let me go back to literature and music with Glenn Gould: the virtuoso, whose method Said finds in full accord with Vico’s notion of invention “finding a theme and developing it contrapunctually so that all its possibilities are articulated, expressed, and elaborated” both endowed with the “ability to see human history as something made by the unfolding capacity of the working human mind” (OLS 128)
The book also shifts from invention to subversion. Here is sexuality ‘reaking havoc’ as the Asian god Dyonisus’s enters Thebes in Euripides’ Bacchae; that great destroyer of myths (pp.138 &140). In In Cavafi’s poems, Said discovers another: “the power to render disenchantment and pleasure without resolving the contradictions between them” (Said: 2006, 148)
On Late Style has now definitely shifted from PLACE (East/West, the main focus as in Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism) to TIME.
This marks also a shift from Foucault to Vico and from Vico to Marx and Gramsci, via Adorno, Williams, Lukacs, Poulantzas, etc. In fact, Said goes back to a main concept he borrowed from Vico since his Beginnigs: “human history as something made by the unfolding capacity of the working human mind” (Said: 2006, 128). And where there are no
more binaries; there remain merely unresolved contradictions.
A few words on Said warnings against culturalism and identitarianism. The call can be interpreted as a warning against the trap Huntington sets up in his Clash of Civilizations: he diverts attention to CLASH in order to hide CIVILIZATION. The latter is imposed by Huntington as the one and only interpretation of life and history and the ultimate paradigm of the ‘End of History’ as it were. He posits that the economic interpretation has died with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the colonial interpretation has been rendered obsolete by the end of colonialism. In this case, civilizations are not only religiously defined formations (confucian, Islamic, catholic and orthodox) but are also seen from the point of view of north American geostrategic interests and phobias.
Huntington is confirming Said’s doubts quoted above imperialism is the exportation of identity.
Since his Beginnings he had radically differentiated beginings from origins. Whereas, origins are deemed to be inherited and impose a search for them in the past, origins are voluntarily chosen, even created, and are open to the future.
Mahmoud Darwish got it right when he attributed to Said these verses in his poem Tibaq (counterpoint): “identity is the product of birth; but, in the last instance it its owner’s creation, not the inheritance of a past”.
Let me go back to the couple knowledge/power: (I am not sure it amounts to a muthanna; but no couple is perfect).
I wish to make the point that the reduction of imperialism to the interplay of the couple knowledge/power tends to sanitize imperialism by dropping two of its most constitutive components: military occupation and violence on the one hand and economic exploitation on the other
As early as Culture and Imperialism Said had redefined imperialism as primarily concerned with the “control of overseas markets, raw materials, cheap labor, and highly profitable land” (Said 1994, pp. 13-14).
To conclude: granted that orientalist knowledge is a mis-representation of the ‘Orient’, remains that its other and more important function was to help colonial powers control, conquer and exploit, and it still does so in the age of globalized neo imperialism.
It follows, that the main question is: how and what should the peoples – on the other side of the neo-colonial knowledge/power equation – produce – in terms of knowledge and acquire in terms of power – in order to liberate themselves from colonialism?
What is the ‘against knowledge’? What is the ‘alter knowledge’? what is the ‘empowering knowledge’ that should be produced in the countries of the South in order that knowledge become a force of liberation? It is surely not a mere deconstruction of orientalist discourses, or the constant nagging about misrepresention of the East or of the demonization of the Arab and the Muslim in and by the ‘West”. It is rather a critique and a deconstruction of ‘the views from the East (or from the South)’ – i.e. of Occidentalism – as patient, thorough, elaborate, sophisticated as the critique and deconstruction of Orientalism itself.