78 Howe Edward Said and Marxism.pdf

8/13/2019 78 Howe Edward Said and Marxism.pdf

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Cultural Critique 67Fall 2007Copyright 2007 Regents of the University of Minnesota

EDWARD SAID AND MARXISMANXIETIES OF INFLUENCE

Stephen Howe

To his admirers, Edward Said hasespecially since his deathcome to be seen as the ideal type of critical intellectual, and Oriental-ism an ur-text for multiple enquiries and intellectual or even personaltransmutations. For Timothy Brennan, Orientalism

turned out to be not only a book for knowing but a manual for doing. Itwas not just a book to emulate, but a book whose content addressed howto 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 there-fore get ourselves back, but transformed. (2001, 99)

This sounds strangely similar to Louis Althussers rhapsodic evoca-tion of the inexhaustible, transformative experience of reading MarxsCapital:

we have been able to read it every day, transparently, in the dramas anddreams of our history, in its disputes and conXicts, in the defeats and

victories of the workers movement which is our only hope and our des-tiny. (Althusser and Balibar 1970, 13)

Yet even if Saids work stimulates in some devotees an enthusiasmcomparable to that felt for Marxs by some followers, the actual rela-tionship has been notably problematic.1 It is striking that, althoughmany of Saids admirers would call themselves Marxists, a great dealof 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, butordinarily in ways that were brief, allusive, ambivalentand whenhe was more forthcoming, it was largely when directly challenged onthe issue by interviewers, rather than in his own written texts. In one


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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 in-suf Wcient . . . but Ive never indulged in anti-Marxism either (Said1992b, 259). He linked this insuf Wciency to the political irrelevanceof academic Marxism in the United States and the dogmatism andpro-Sovietism of political Marxism in the Arab world (25961). Thatleaves, he went on, nevertheless, a great deal there to be interestedin (261). Many of the theorists and activists for whom Said expressedgreatest admiration, from C. L. R. James to Theodor Adorno, RaymondWilliams to Amilcar Cabral, occupied some place in the very broad

church of non-Soviet Marxism; and he intermittently engagedinlargely 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 almostdefensive, that he had always tried my best to deal with it [Marxistthought] in a very vigorous way (1992b, 261).

Yet the most important, or at least most evident, relevant intel-lectual relationships were not with Marxism as a body or traditioneither of thought or of political action (or a cluster of them) but witha number of individual thinkers who are conventionally designatedas Marxist: Adorno and Gramsci, Lukcs and Fanon, Williams and,more broadly and diffusely, Marxist historians writing on imperial-ism. One may well wonder whether these very disparate Wgureswho, furthermore, tended to Wgure in or exert an apparent inXuenceon often quite different parts and periods of Saids workactuallyhave enough in common for the Marxist label to have much ana-lytical 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. Saidclosely engaged with a speciWcally Western Marxismboth in PerryAndersons (1976) sense of a western European intellectual traditionfocused mostly on philosophical and aesthetic questions, and in the

later conW

guration of a mainly Anglophone academic milieu. In a verydifferent fashion and later in his career, he attended to a diffuse assemblage of radical and Marxist thinkers from the colonial and postcolo-nial worlds. He had little apparent intellectual contact either with theclassical Marxist tradition of political economy and direct political

E D WA R D S A I D A N D M A R X I S M 51


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engagement, or with the latter-day successors of that tradition: indeedone might say his links with the latter came only at second hand, asmediated through the work of some Marxist historians, mostly British,for whom he expressed admiration. Certainly there is no substantialdiscussion of or reference to Marxs (or Engelss) own major writingsanywhere in Saids. Nor is thereperhaps more surprisinglyanysigniWcant attention to Marxist theories of imperialism. Althoughsome such theorists arementioned,mostly inapproving terms, inSaidswritings their ideas are not actually discussed or evaluated. There isalso 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 notedthis omission with some sharpness and feel that, both in his morewide-ranging work and in his speciWcally political, Palestinian writ-ings, Said culpably neglected the thought of, for instance, PalestinianCommunists like Emile Habibi, Emil Touma, and TawWq Zayyat. SuchWgures, it is suggested, anticipated much of what Said said about theIsraeliPalestinian conXict. (Said admiringly references Habibis Wc-tion but not his political writings or activities.)

Given all of the foregoing, is there any particular importance inidentifying, tracing, or debating Saids, or any other particular con-temporary thinkers, af Wliations to or divergences from somethingcalled Marxism, or to and from some almost inevitably very hetero-geneous assemblage of writers who may more or less aptly be thuslabeled? What follows here is in large part exegetical and thus delib-erately ducks that question, though I return to it in conclusion. Obvi-ously, it matters more or in different ways in some contexts than inothers, 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 anEast Coast Counter-Establishment along with suchWgures as NoamChomsky, Richard Falk, and Eqbal Ahmad. Here, shared activist polit-ical perspectives, above all a mutual anti-imperialism in relation toU.S. foreign policy, were more important than whether individuals

called themselves Marxists (some did; probably more did not). In thePalestinian political world, the latter question counted for more, butdid so, one might venture, largely and increasingly in the sense thatMarxist, there, is a particular species of the genus secularist. InNorth Atlantic academic worlds, whether one was a Marxist probably

S T E P H E N H O W E52


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mattered more again, but in ever more depoliticised ways. In reactionagainst this, Said averred that belonging or not belonging to a Marx-ist tradition seems to me interesting only if they are connected to apractice, which in turn is connected to a political movement (1992b,259). And as Saids work was read and responded to elsewhere, per-haps especially in India, perceived relations to Marxism took on yetdifferent 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 inthe nature of academic attention to colonial and postcolonial ques-

tions, especially among radicals: crudely, from political and economicto cultural, from empiricist to theoreticist (with strong deconstruc-tionist, postmodernist, and discourse-analytical inXuences), from stateto 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 re-lative neglect of themes and preoccupations with which Marxistshad been especially concerned, there was an inevitable tendency toblame his inXuence, as was done by Indian Marxist social historianSumit Sarkar (1994; 1997) and more heatedly by critic Aijaz Ahmad(1992). A little later, from within the subdisciplines of colonial andpostcolonial literary or cultural theory, a distinctively materialist orneo-Marxist current offered sharp critiques of much post-Saidianwork in theseWelds, though in this case they ordinarily did not directlyattack Said himself (see many of the essays in such collections as Bar-tolovich and Lazarus 2002 or Chrisman 2003). There is even, in someof this work, a touch of what one might ungenerously think of as theczarist Russian little father syndrome: whatever one is dissatisWedwith must be the fault not of the czar himself but of his wicked ormisguided underlings.

Saids Wrst book, to which he has almost never subsequentlyreferred and which has not been reprinted, was a revised version of his doctoral thesis on Joseph Conrad (Said 1966). The book is a rela-

tively narrowly focused study of autobiographical currents in Con-rads short stories and novels, illuminated through a close reading of his personal letters. It offers few if any anticipations of Saids latermain themes, making almost no reference to colonial questions, andcertainly 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 subjugatedPoland, and the Palestinian fate. If this is so, it is never made explicit;though in much later writings, Said pointed to these connections, bothpolitical and biographical, as keys to his abiding fascination withConrad. Heart of Darkness, for instance, is not discussed as a colonialtext (though Kurtzs status as arch-European is noted in passing) but as a representation of the historic predicament of mind-torturedmodern Europe (1966, 113). Mind-tortured, that is, because of theexistential predicament of intellectuals caught between contemplation

and action, not, as the later Said would suggest, for directly politicalreasons or ones connected with Europes overseas imperial expansion.Even when, a decade later and well after Said had already becomeintensely engaged with the politics of the Middle East, he returned toclose discussion of Conrad in his Beginnings, the colonial theme raisedits head only with tantalizing brevity, when Captain Mitchells clashwith the bloodthirsty Sotillo in Nostromo emphasizes the disparity between colonial and native (1975a, 101).

Conrad, then, had only passing hints of the preoccupations thatwere to distinguish almost all Saids subsequent work. Awide range of philosophers and literary theorists, some of them Marxists, is alludedto in the bookSartre, Heidegger, Lucien Goldmann, Blackmur, Nie- buhr, Jaspers, Auerbach, and perhaps most frequently, Lukcs andSchopenhauerbut it does not present, and is certainly not organizedaround, theoretical or philosophical concerns as such. The book thatestablished Said as an inXuential and innovative younger critic washis second, Beginnings. Published in 1975, it was both an intenselytheoretical endeavor and a work with considerably more politicalundertones than his Wrst book.

This, the mid-1970s, was the Wrst moment of theory in NorthAmerican literary criticism. What had previously seemed a ratherstaid academic discipline, dominated on the one hand by the aesthet-ics of the New Criticism and on the other by philology, was being

transformed by an infusion of ideas drawn mainly from French phi-losophy and linguistic analysis. Said himself, with Beginnings and anumber of associated theoretical essays (see 1971a, 1971b; 1984a), wasat the forefront of this change, accompanied by several other high-proWle 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 wereradically different from theirs. As he later noted (e.g., 1984a, 3) thenewfound enthusiasm for theory in the 1970s was widely seen as in-surrectionary, somehow associated with the radical ferment of 1968and after in U.S., French, and other Western universities and societies.In fact, though, the impact of the new theoretical currents in NorthAmerica soon appeared to become far removed from any obviouspolitical engagement. Indeed, as Said complained, much of this workabandoned the existential actualities of human life, politics, societiesand events (1984a, 5). Already in a 1976 interview, he was saying

that, while he shared many of the theoretical interests of critics likeHarold Bloom and of the Yale deconstructionists, he regretted theirlack of concern with historical and political questions (1976a, 31, 33,35). Said, by contrast, was ever more directly concerned to press forpolitical relevance and engagement in literary study. More strikinglystill, he remained in some troubled, ambiguous, but strong sense atraditional humanist, at a time when French-model antihumanismwas hegemonic among avant-garde criticsas indeed it still was inthe late 1990s. Even when Said was most under the inXuence of suchtheories, in the 1970s, he kept his distance from them in this regard,frequently qualifying Foucaults and Derridas antihumanism withsuch adjectives as bleak, tyrannical, and nihilistic. His insis-tence at the end of Orientalism that there could be, and indeed was,a knowledge and discourse that was not corrupt or blind butemancipatory (1978, 326) was, he later suggested, deliberately anti-Foucault (1987b, 137). And in early essays like that on Merleau-Ponty(1967), his enthusiasm is reserved for those Wgures in modern Frenchthought who stress the immediacy and concreteness of lived experi-encethose who remain humanistsas against the constructors of grand but alienating philosophical systems.

Beginnings may further surprise observers of the later Said by itsunThird 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 acompartment separate from his academic work until 1978s Oriental-ism brought together literature and politics in a mixture that all Saidssubsequent writing kept up. In an interview, he spoke of Orientalismas marrying what had previously been two equally intense but



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parallel and separate concerns: literature and culture, on the onehand, and studies and analyses of power, on the otherand it isclear in context that by the latter he means crucially his direct politi-cal involvement with Palestinian affairs (1993b, 23). Beginnings, incontrast, 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. Verylittle in this product of an erudite, ambitious young American pro-fessor anticipates the angry older man, the scourge of colonialism andZionism, that was the latter-day Said. Even when Said, in a separate

essay around the same time, discussed Lawrence in closer detail, hewas interested mainly in him as an example of a special but extremeform of life: the decentered one (in 2000c, 32; originally published in197071) and as someone who sought toWnd a psychic home throughwriting. Saids Lawrence, like his Conrad, is depicted in ways thatmake him startlingly like the younger Saids image of himself: an in-ternally divided, homeless, exilic consciousness. He is only inciden-tally a servant of Empire or an actor in Middle East politics.

Nonetheless, there are important connections between the earlierand the later work. As Timothy Brennan (1992) has pointed out, almostall Saids subsequent preoccupations may be found at least in embryoin Beginnings and in Saids responses to criticism of that work, espe-cially an interview carried by the journal Diacritics (Said 1976a). Someof these connections may be sought in the idea of beginning itself.Said was always interested in the notion of politics as an affair of rivalnarratives, with each movement trying to validate its picture of theworld by telling a tale about its own birth and origin. The IsraeliPalestinian conXict is for him a classic example (see, for example, Said1984b and 1986a). He often noted that presenting the Palestinian casein the world media means having to keep retelling the story from thestart, insisting that there is a story. Later he would link these politicalconcerns even more directly with questions of literary styleanassociation of ideas that might be thought either penetrating or pre-

posterousas for instance in describing the 1988 Palestine NationalCouncil meeting as dominated by obsessive postmodern rhetoricalanxieties. . . . Words, commas, semicolons, and paragraphs were thecommon 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 politicalprograms.

This is already associated, in Beginnings, with what was to becomeperhaps Saids mostcentral termofapprobation and self-identiWcation:the secular critic. The idea of the beginning is contrasted with that of origins: a discourse of origins involves mythologizing and privilegingits subject, while that of Beginnings is always more provisional, lessauthoritative, more mobile and open to critique, more resistant tototalizing aspirations. In a wordthe word Said thereafter used toencompass all thisit is secular.

Part of the perceived novelty of Orientalism, a few years later, camefrom the strikingly inclusive range of sources through which Saidtraced the orientalist discourse: scholarly tomes, novels, travelogues,philological and religious texts, and policy brieWngs from institutesclose to government. Beginnings, despite its relative lack of attentionto nonNorth Atlantic writings, already anticipates part of this cath-olicity, or eclecticism, drawing in Wction and autobiography, philo-sophical and linguistic writings, psychoanalysis, and religious textslike Ernest Renans Life of Jesus. Also anticipating later developmentswas that, although the books focus was of course overwhelminglyliterary and philosophical, its Wnal pages shifted intriguingly towarda political register. The issue of opposition to the Vietnam War, asenergizing focus for intellectual debate, raised its head (375). Thetheme of hostility toward intellectual specialization, hierarchy, andauthority, to which Said was so often later to return, was mooted(379). And in a remarkably unexpected conjunction of names Saidsuggested, in the context of emphasis on the evident irregularity anddiscontinuity of knowledge that

here Foucault and Deleuze rejoin the adversary epistemological currentfound in Vico, in Marx and Engels, in Lukcs, in Fanon, and also in theradical political writings of Chomsky, Kolko, Bertrand Russell, WilliamA. Williams and others. (1975a, 378)

It is hard to see what enjoined the selection, among all possibly rele-vant political writers, of Noam Chomsky, Gabriel Kolko, Russell, andWilliams except that all four were Werce critics of U.S. foreign policy,especially in Vietnam. A directly political, if still somewhat surrepti-tious, message was being signaled.2



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Beginnings is, then, not only a complex but an internally contra-dictory text; like so much of Saids later major work, it contains epi-sodes where, as J. Hillis Miller said in his review of the book, theauthor constantly recognizes these contradictions, without quiterecognizing them, in passages which are like slips of the tongue or of the pen(1976, 4). Saids own distinction between the writersauthor-ity and that authoritys inevitable molestationthe ways in whicha narrator cannot avoid being aware of, and revealing, the artiWcialand even duplicitous character of his or her own ostensible narra-tive certainties (1975a, 8385; see also 1971b)could be turned against

his own book. It is a work of philosophically saturated literary theorythat intermittently signals its authors suspicion of the totalizing ambi-tions characteristic of such theorizing, a book almost entirely centeredon the western European canon yet at least hinting that the mostpressing 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 thecentrality of politics to Saids concerns, a text whose reception restedmainly on its enthusiastic presentation of contemporary Frenchideasespecially Foucaultsbut whose real hero was the almostentirely incompatibleWgure of Vico, a book written in a largely imper-sonal style yet pursuing an intensely personal and even idiosyncraticagenda.

Said followed Beginnings with a series of essays on related themesof literary theory, collected in The World, the Text, and the Critic (1984a).They date from the early 1970s and are inevitably disparate in theirtheoretical and political preoccupations as well as in their subjectmatter.3 So far as the texts thus yoked together have a unifying com-mon thread, it lies in reXection on the nature of criticism itselfpri-marily, though not exclusively, literary criticism. More speciWcally, itlies in defense and advocacy of a particular model of criticism: in thetitle words of the essays that begin and end the collection, advocacyof secular as against religious criticism.4 In various pieces in The

World, the Text, and the Critic, Said sees the secular as exempliW

ed inWgures as diverse as Jonathan Swift, Giambattisto Vico, Eric Auerbach,and (for all their centrality to the orientalist tradition) RaymondSchwab and Louis Massignon. Conversely, the targets of Saids nega-tive critique are not only the explicitly or conventionally religious



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criticsfrom postwar U.S. New Criticism to those who treat WalterBenjamin as a de-MarxiWed mysticbut all those who propose oradopt modes of theorizing that, in his opinion, totalize or mystifytheir own formation or that downgrade or eschew historical inquiryand political engagement: here, for instance, not only Jacques Der-rida and, increasingly, Michel Foucault but even more their Americanepigones are found at fault. Thus most self-proclaimedly radical aca-demic theorizing in the United States is lambasted for its hermeticself-absorption, its political irrelevance:

the oppositional manner of new New Criticism does not accurately rep-resent its ideas and practice, which, after all is said and done, furthersolidify and guarantee the social structure and the culture that producedthem. Deconstruction, for example, is practiced as if Western culturewere being dismantled; semiotic analysis argues that its work amountsto 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 re-vealed on close examination to be no more than a haphazard anec-dotal content enriched neither by much knowledge of what politicsand political issues are all about nor by any very developed awarenessthat politics is something more than liking or disliking some intellec-tual orthodoxy now holding sway over a department of literature(172). Said was to suggest (in 1982, 2) that in reaction against suchtrends, it was worth attempting a bold, sweeping argument about therelationship of culture to power, even at the risk of seeming crudelypolemical.

In later work, Said became especially and increasingly hostile topostmodernist theory, saying of contemporary U.S. intellectuals thatJargons of an almost unimaginable rebarbativeness dominate theirstyles . . . an astonishing sense of weightlessness with regard to thegravity of history and individual responsibility fritters away attention

to public matters, and to public discourse (1984a, 36667; the com-plaint is forcefully reiterated in Said 1994b, 2122, and in 2000c, xxiii,where he suggests that anti-foundationalist arguments like thoseof Hayden White or Richard Rorty could only come from minds sountroubled 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 bypolitico-moral concerns: anger at injustice, an intolerance of oppres-sion, and some fairly unoriginal ideas about freedom and knowledge(1976a, 36). And with a Wnal rhetorical twist of the knife, Said scornsliterary theorys pretence to radicalism: theory is taught so as to makethe student believe that he or she can become a Marxist, a feminist, anAfrocentrist, or a deconstructionist with about the same effort andcommitment 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 beinga solitary idiosyncrasy of Said, but in the 1970s it was still associatedlargely with Marxist critics. And although by this time the work of such major European Marxist writers on aesthetics as Benjamin andLukcs was belatedly being discovered byAnglophone readers, and itsimportance urged by people like Raymond Williams and Terry Eagle-ton in Britain and Fredric Jameson in America, the Marxist criticaltradition in English was still viewed as consisting mainly of Wguresfrom the 1930s like Christopher Caudwell and Ralph Fox, whose ten-dency to a fairly crude economism and whose academic marginality(not to mention their premature deaths: Caudwell and Fox were bothkilled in the Spanish Civil War) meant they were not taken very seri-ously by the scholarly mainstream. Said, with his own complex butfairly distant relationship to Marxism was urging the politicizationof literary study from a very different direction and in a more sophis-ticated form.

In these mostly very brief evocations of a generalized idea of Marxism in Saids earlier work, what is perhaps most striking is thatit serves rhetorically as an image of what a truly and fully politicallyengaged criticism should be but ordinarily is not. Saids own politi-cal engagement, primarily with Middle East affairs, intensiWed fromthe early 1970s. HisWrst 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 from1970 (Said 1970a,b). The former, an angry survey of the hostile im-ages 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 variousArab



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countries where Palestinians lived in exile, sketches of recent history,and reXection on current political trends including the new emergenceof an organized Palestinian resistance: a blending of themes that was,again, to characterize much of his later work. During that year he pub-lished two other articles on the subject: one a short response to ShlomoAvineris critique of The Palestinian Experience, the other a brief contribution to the Middle East Newsletter entitled A PalestinianVoice. The very titlesThe Arab Portrayed, The Palestinian Ex-perience, A Palestinian Voicesuggested both the extremely gen-eral 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 poseas an abstract representative, a laboratory specimen of the Arab orthe Palestinian in American literary culture. But for some time, thisstrengthening preoccupation operated in parallel rather than interre-lation with Saids literary studies. It was evident that he had alreadyacquired a very substantial knowledge of regional affairs and of UnitedStates foreign policy; indeed an article like United States ForeignPolicy and the ConXict of Powers in the Middle East (1973) referredto a range of of Wcial and quasi-of Wcial materials in the Weld probablywider 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 stresson the complexity and interest-driven rather than ideology-drivennature of American policy, this was close to being a piece of conven-tional international relations scholarship and quite unlike anythingelse Said has ever written. The full conjunction of that essays con-cerns and emphases, those of Said the activist-analyst of politicalpowers everyday workings and the preoccupations of Said the liter-ary scholar, was still to come. Its genesis could already be discernedin interview (1976a), in one or two mid-seventies essays (notably1975b), 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 full-grown 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 essayson the impact of the 1973 ArabIsraeli war, with many of the sameexamples of contemporary (mainly U.S.) anti-Arab prejudice thatfeature in the later sections of Orientalism and the same foundational



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insistence that the key to orientalist thought is the binary, hierarchi-cal opposition between East and West (Said 1975b). The overarchingframework, however, was rather different from and simpler than whatwas to be presented three years later, perhaps in part because of themore directly politicized context and in part because the Foucaul-dian concept of discourse in 197475 had not yet become as central toSaids thinking on the issue as it was to be a few years later. In theearlier essay, although the term discourse is occasionally used andFoucault is referred to at the very end of the essay, orientalism is dis-cussed 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 aredismissed, more sweepingly and crudely than was to be the case inOrientalism itself, with such epithets as culturally decadent, quitestupid, and fraudulent (Said 1975b, 425). But the myths on whichthey are founded (with Saids discussion of myth acknowledging adebt to Roland Barthes, but with the term mainly being employedsimply to mean falsehood or delusion) are suggested to be in theprocess of being shattered. The unexpectedly effective performance of the Egyptian and otherArab armies against Israel in 1973 is celebratedas a major blow against such myths of Arab incapacity. The militaryefforts of the Arab states, therefore, are regarded as positive and effec-tive in a way that the later Said would come wholly to repudiate, eventhough Said also insists that war Wnally determines nothing; at bot-tom it is only violence (447). He proclaims, in language it is hard toimagine him using even a little later, that the October War itself nowseems like an act of theoretical will (445). Indeed where Foucaultswork is invoked, it is as a footnote to the essays closing assertion thatwhat is most needed is the intellectual equivalent of the war, whichis sustained anti-mythological, self-conscious thought (447).

Orientalism signaled its shift away from this directly politico-activist orientation at the outset and, ironically, by its use of KarlMarxs words. It took as one of its epigraphs Marxs comment (ori-ginally made about French peasants) that they cannot representthemselves; they must be represented. Marx was not, of course, here



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expressing his own view of the peasantryalthough he did indeedhave a pretty low opinion of its political potentiality as a classbutpresenting what he took to be the Bonapartist attitude to them. Theterm representation has had two main meanings: a political and anartistic one: to represent in the sense of acting or standing in for, asin the notion of representative democracy where elected politiciansrule, supposedly, on behalf of the people; and to represent in thesense of depicting or designating. Marxs original comment had beenmeant in the Wrst sense only, but it is precisely the links between thetwo that form Saids subject: how artistic and other depictions of the

East relate to and further political substitutions, where Western-ers dominated and remade Eastern societies.5Pursuing this theme in the way that soon became enormously

inXuential, Said did so without either acknowledging a signiWcantMarxist inXuence or undertaking further substantial use of Marxsown work, other than to indict him for his brief writings on India ashimself an orientalist and Eurocentrist.6 Saids procedures were alsovery far from anything ordinarily thought of as Marxist inXuenced inanother sense. He did not extend his discussion of orientalist discourseto include any writings produced in or for the kinds of institutionsthat had been the main focus of Marxist historians and indeed of Fou-cault, and that might well be thought more central to colonialist projects than the texts with which he did engage, such as courts andpolice forces, hospitals and asylums, armies and factories.7 Nor werescientiWc discourses,even those of pseudo-scientiWc racism, includedapart from brief allusions to the support Social Darwinism gave tothe colonial enterprise (227, 23233). Such huge omissions obviouslyreXected Saids own speciWcally literary intellectual formation andinterests. And, although complaint at them is somewhat ungenerousin light of the great range of texts he did consider, the general ten-dency of his followers and of later cultural analysts of colonialism toreplicate his blind spots was surely more surprising and indeed dam-aging to their enterprise. Moreover, in alluding to various genealo-

gies for the orientalist idea, he made one quite striking omission:orientalism in political theory and historical sociology, in whichMarxs Asiatic Mode of Production and Wittfogels Oriental Despo-tism (1957) might take their places (on this genealogy, see for instanceSpringborg 1992).



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Saids major 1993 book Culture and Imperialism represents in someways a further dramatic break from its authors earlier writings. Oneof the most striking aspects of these is that it is, as these things arenow understood in literary-academic circles, a quite Wercely untheo-reticaleven antitheoreticalbook.8 Said there repeatedly expressesgreat scorn for the main currents of contemporary literary theory:which means his repudiation of much work that had developed partlyunder his own inXuence. Culture and Imperialism is marked also by ex-plicit, repeated, andWerce rejections of the culturalism that has shapedso much recent writing about empire and its legacies. Discussion of

imperialism in this writing has ever more often been framed bynotions of a clash of cultures, between cultural imperialism and itssupposed antithesis, cultural nationalism: shaped by assumptions of the kind announced (though also interestingly questioned) by FrantzFanon, that every culture isWrst and foremost national (Fanon 1967[1961], 174). Many readers, accustomed to this genre of nationalistand identitarian thought, might have expected Culture and Imperial-ism to be a work in that vein, a polemic about the imperialist subju-gation 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 isthe great retreat from radicalism in European thought since the 1970s,for which Wgures like Lyotard and Foucaultsymptomatically, oncechampionsof Third World freedom movementsareemblematic (Said1993a, 29). Its discourse proclaims the futility of revolution, the bar- barism of postcolonial regimes, the ubiquity of Third World terror-ism (30). The French post-Marxist intellectuals did not so much repeatNapoleons retreat from Moscow as seek symbolically to annul deCastriess defeat at Dien Bien Phu. This road from Conrad, as Saiddescribes it, ends in either insensate hatred for Third World, and henceall, radicalism, or in the abject withdrawal from social engagement thatSaid, following Orwell and Rushdie (and, unacknowledged, Edward

Thompson) calls being inside the whale. In this vein of polemic, wemight characterize Saids relation to Marxism as a double negative:without saying anything particularly positive about the Marxist tra-dition, 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 thenturns to geographical approaches, above all Gramscis writing on theSouthern Question. He endorses his former studentTimothy Brennansenthusiasm for Gramsci as a paradigm for understanding the trans-mutation, diffusion, and interpenetration of cultures over time (Said1993a, 5658; and see Brennan 1989, 4050).

This is but one of several af Wrmative invocations of Gramcsisideas scattered across Saids work. Some others will be considered alittle later. But the use made of Gramsci here, in the early sections of

Culture and Imperialism, points toward something far broader and moreimportant. Behind Saids repeatedly rehearsed ambivalence over ques-tions of collective identity, as behind many other recurring problemsin 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 Foucaultand of Gramsci. In a sense, then, digging deeper into the role of Marx-ism in Saids work requires at least brief attention,Wrst, to the oppo-site pole of attraction, theWgure generally acknowledged as the mostimportant non- or even anti-Marxist theoretical inXuence on Said:Michel Foucault.

SpeciWcally within colonial and postcolonial studies it has beenmostly through Saids use of his ideas, especially in Orientalism, thatFoucault has gained global attention. In that book, though, Foucaultis a background presence, providing some of its most important orga-nizing assumptions, rather than an object of extended direct discussion.Saids own more detailed engagement with Foucault was conductedin other places, including a 1972 essay that appeared in the journalboundary 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 someof Saids other earlier essays the Foucauldian inXuence and tone areubiquitous, as with a piece discussing Vicos ideas and style in terms

of the body, language, and discipline (1976c). Much later Said was torepudiate, 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 indeedover and over again . . . Saids counter-Foucauldian demur, his



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balanced conclusions based on a cautious, andWnally emphatic, depar-ture 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 notexisted at all (2001, 9091). Yet perhaps Brennan, reacting against this,in his turn understates Foucaults importance to Said, as he may alsooverstate 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 withsome 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 Chosesisdescribed as a bookwhose literary and philosophical implications are overwhelming(Said 1975a. 285). Above all, for Said, Foucault is the one who begins awholly novel way of seeing history and of reading texts: it is as thefounder of a newWeld of research (or of a new way of conceiving anddoing research) that he will continue to be known and regarded (291).It is this Foucault, from among the ever-growing number becomingavailable, whom Said takes as inspiration for his critique oforientalism.

In The World, the Text, and the Critic, the distance between Saidand Foucault is considerably greater and more fully articulated. In thelong, dense, brilliantly argued Criticism between Culture and Sys-tem, Foucault and Derrida are systematically measured against oneanother, to the formers advantage. But Said levels sharp criticismsagainst Foucault, too. There is argued to be a continuing, acknowl-edged but unresolved, uncertainty over the relationship between indi-vidual subjectivity or intentionality and collective force or structuraldetermination (Said 1984a, 187). There is (and this is certainly at bestan overstated claim) an alleged inability on Foucaults part to dealwith, or provide an account of, historical change (188). Foucault isseen as successful in his detailed historical description, far less so inmarshalling general explanationindeed his greatest strengths lie inhis ability somehow to put aside his enormously complex theoreti-cal apparatus . . . and let the material he has dug up create its own

order and its own theoretical lessons (215). This is both a rather faintand a rather odd kind of praise: few historians practicing in theWeldswith which Foucault has dealt would regard his strengths as an empir-ical historian, or as one willing to let his archival materials tell theirown story, as being among his major claims to distinction.



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In Criticism between Culture and System, and even more inTravelling Theory, the language in which Said criticizes Foucaulthas a markedly Marxian, and more speciWcally Gramscian, cast: theseare arguably Saids most nearly Marxist texts:

The difference between discourse and such coarser yet no less signiW-cant Welds of social combat as the class struggle is that discourse worksits productions, discriminations, censorship, interdictions, and invali-dations 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 understand-ings of power is argued to be the source of his greatest weakness: themost 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 andespecially imperial dimensions of power 222).

In Travelling Theory Said pushes the quarrel one stage further,arguing that a tendency to theoretical overtotalization . . . system-atic degradation of theory (24243) in Foucault leads him, and evenmore his admiring acolytes, into providing alibis for political retro-gression: Foucaults theory of power is a Spinozist conception, whichhas captivated not only Foucault himself but many of his readers whowish . . . to justify political quietism with sophisticated intellectualism,at the same time wishing to appear realistic, in touch with the worldof power and reality (245). Foucaults imprisoning overtotalizationis seen as all the more pernicious in its effects because it is formu-lated in terms of what seem to be historically documented situa-tions (246). But this is ultimately a purely textualist history, with noroom for emergent movements . . . revolution, counterhegemony, orhistorical blocks (246). All these criticisms, it will be apparent, arevery much those that some commentators had made about Saids ownOrientalism, 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 W

ercely contested politi-cal issues (as Said suggests Foucault did not, rather unfairly over-looking his engagement with such questions as prisoners rights andantiracism) but manifest some intention of alleviating human suf-fering, pain, or betrayed hope (247).



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This complaint at the politically demobilizing, disabling conse-quences of Foucaults theory of power remained Saids central objec-tion thereafter. He returned to itat further length in the essay Foucaultand the Imagination of Power (Said 1986b). In Culture and Imperial-ism the later Foucault is quite simply dismissed as a political renegadealong with Lyotard (1993a, 29). Later still, however, as in a 2000 NewYork Times review of some of Foucaults posthumously collected writ-ings (2000b), Said was once again offering a more nuanced and inpart admiring view, recognizing the relentless erudition, the fertil-ity 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 feltin Orientalism, is less intense, but remained more positive, than thatto Foucault.9 Together with Raymond Williams and Theodor Adorno,Gramsci is by some margin the Marxist thinker most extensively re-ferred to by Said. His is, however, a very particular reading of Gram-sci, one stripped of his speciWc Marxist-Leninist af Wliations. Saidmainly praised, and believed he had learned from, aspects of Gram-scis thought that were rather distant from his Marxism: his interestsin geography and spatiality, his status as a literary humanist, hisaf Wliations to a pessimistic materialist tradition in Italy (Said 1993b,25).10 He was scornful, by contrast, of the latter-day leftist Gramsciindustry: so vague, so out of touch with any political movement of any consequence (25). Said stresses the ambiguities in the crucialconcept of hegemony, which leave it with only a kind of gross fasci-nation, a gross applicability, andWnds Gramscis main value to lie inthe basically geographical cast of his thought: He thinks in termsof territories, in terms of locales, which is tremendously important tome (25). And he associates this territorial or geographical bent withan antideterminist, detotalizing, nonhomogenizing critical spirit, nec-essary counterpoint or corrective to the grand Hegelian tradition of analysis in terms of temporality, a tradition for which Lukcs is seenas the greatest modern exponent. In History, Literature, and Geog-

raphy (2000c [1995b], 46368), the key contrast is that of Gramsciversus 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 andgeography, suggesting that, in Culture and Imperialism and other later



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work, what IWnd myself doing is really, in a certain sense, rethinkinggeography (1994b, 21). He associates this with a wider current of recent historical and cultural writing, of which he sees his work aspart, of a kind of paradigm shift . . . a new, invigorated sense of look-ing at the struggle over geography in interesting and imaginativeways. In 2000, in Critical Inquiry, he again raised such themes in awide-ranging discussion of the power of spatial, geographical imagi-nation and analysis, including the immense burden of competingimages and desires placed on the Palestinian landscape (2000a).

Foucault once proclaimed, in slightly grandstanding style, that

while the nineteenth centurywas preoccupiedby timeand history, ourage concerns itself more with space and geography (Foucault 1986,22). One could indeed perhaps say that the dominant organizing prin-ciple of postcolonial critique, starting with Said, has been that of space:spatial distance and difference, colonialisms control over physicalspace, over territory, images, and metaphors of mapping. Certainlythat has been the consistent preoccupation of Saids work and that of his disciples, as of one phase in Foucaults itinerary and of the slightlylater 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 globalcurrently proclaimed as novel. And what is arguably new is also thatwhich is most speculative, contestable, and tenuous, as with certainpostmodernist rhetorics of time-space compression or thirdspacetrialectics (Soja 1996). Saids own association with such currents has been little more than gestural.

Alongside and in many ways complementary to the Gramscianstrain in Saids work is an inXuence less often noted but clearly impor-tant: that of the Welsh literary and political critic Raymond Wil-liams.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 fromWilliamss ideas about geography that Said drew most; indeed hesuggested that Williams was unique as a critic in that alone of hisgeneration in the United States and Britain he was attuned to the



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astonishingly productive possibilities of the Gramscian critical con-sciousness, Wrmly rooted as that was in . . . landscapes, geographies,mobile spaces (2000c [1995b], 470). He underscored the radical dif-ferences between Williamss senses of place, of location, and origin,and his own: the power of Williamss work is intrinsically at one withits rootedness and even its insularity, qualities that stimulate in thevariously unhoused and rootless energies of people like myself . . . acombination of admiring regard and puzzled envy (1990b, 84). Buthe did not, as lesssubtle and sympathetic critics ofWilliams (like Saidsown 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 pro-nounced and stubborn a theme in his work, because of that we candistinguish and differentiate the other ethnocentrisms with which hiswork in geographical and historical terms interacts contrapuntally(1990b, 83). Even if Saids way of locating Williams as Anglocentricinvolves the familiar blurring of English and British identities andoverlooks Williamss very speciWcally Welsh formation, it offers point-ers toward linking the local and the global, pointers that the laterreXections on imaginative geographies of empire and its aftermathsin Culture and Imperialism were to multiply.13

A further, fourth signiWcant Marxist relationship requiring noteis that with cultural theorist Theodor Adorno, who is a recurring ref-erence point in Saids later writings. Adorno is not discussed in Begin-nings or The World, the Text, and the Critic, nor indeed is he mentionedin the trilogy of Orientalism, The Question of Palestine,andCovering Islam(after all, Adornos relationship to non-European cultures was one of sublime indifference, rather than active, orientalist engagement). InSaids writings of the 1980s and 1990s, however, Adorno Wgures evermore frequently, especially in the work on music, naturally enough,for Adorno had been in Saids eyes one of the few great practition-ers 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, couldreally talk about anything, everything, as Said glowingly asserted(1992b, 243). Adorno became for him a model of the modern intel-lectual both in positive waysin his sheer rangeand in negativeones. For much of Adornos messagehis cultural conservatism, his



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increasing disengagement from active politics, his gloomy convictionthat musics former liberatory potential had been lost (see Adorno1973), that there was no longer a social space in which it could oper-ate, above all Adornos overarching pessimismwas alien to Said.Thus time after timethroughout Musical Elaborations, at scatteredpoints in Culture and Imperialism and its associated essays, in his essayOn Fidelio (1997), above all in a published lecture on Adornos workand the idea of late style (1995a)Saids engagement has been bothadmiring and critical. He notes that in musical scholarship such con-nections between art and social form have, despite distinguished

exceptions, not often been made; nor has enough attention been paidto social and political determinants in musicology. Very few peoplehave written about music as, say, Williams wrote about literature, orFoucault about the history of disciplines (1991, xvi). There has beena general failure since Adorno to connect formal musical analysis toideology, or social space, or power, or to the formation of an individ-ual (and by no means sovereign) ego (xvii). And Adornos own workon music cannot, for all Saids admiration for it, provide him with amodel; not only are Adornos elitism and his sweeping disdain for allvernacular forms unacceptable to him but so is his crude (if not alwaysconsistently adhered to) view that since the heroic era around theFirst World War there has in the Western classical tradition beennothing more than a history of decline, a retrogression into the tradi-tional (Adorno 1973, 5). It is, in sum, hard to speak of a direct Adorn-ian inXuence in any of Saids major worksexcept those dealingspeciWcally with musicdespite the numerous gestures of praise.Rather, there are similarities or af Wnities (on which see further Varad-harajan 1995; Hussein 2002, 23235).14 There is moreover almost noactive engagement in Saids work with Frankfurt School thinkersother than Adorno, or indeed with contemporary German thought ingeneralthis has echoes of Orientalisms much-criticized neglect of German orientalists. It is surprising, for instance, toWnd no referenceto Habermas anywhere in Saids writing, and very few to Benjamin.

If critical but often affectionate encounters with certain key W

g-ures in Western MarxismAdorno, Gramsci, Lukcs, Williamswasone major strand in Saids thought as it interrelated with Marxism,another operated in a largely discrete, parallel fashion and in mostlyquite 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 gesturesof political af Wliation to) radical thought in the decolonizing andpostcolonial world, including the very large Marxist presence in suchthought. In the 1992 interview already quoted, where he laid out hisattitudes toward Marxism in unusually explicit fashion, Said was crit-ical of those like Perry Anderson who in his view identiWed Marxismalmost entirely with that Western tradition, and speciWcally faulted thelack 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 tothe earlier primary resistance movements and millenarian revoltsagainst colonialism, raisingthough refusing decisively to resolvethe question of whether these should be seen mostly as negative, backward-looking reactions to European modernity or as precur-sors of modern nationalism (1993a, 23539). He suggests, too simply,that which perspective one chooses will depend primarily on whoone 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 successionhe proclaims: from colonial to post-colonial intellectuals, from nationalism to liberation. Saids laterwork moved ever more decisively, though in inconsistent and unthe-orized ways, toward celebrating or emphasizing recuperation of thevoices of the colonized, the anticolonialist, and the postcolonial. Onone level this may be seen as a generalization across the Third Worldof claims initially made in the Palestinian context, claims for the capac-ity and power of the marginalized to construct their own narratives,to tell their own tales (see Said 1980; 1984b). On another it is an ex-tended rejoinder to those critics who had complained that in Orien-talism the power to speak is monopolized by the colonizer. As Saidhimself says, What I left out of Orientalism was that response to West-ern dominance which culminated in the great movement of decoloni-zation 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, thoughmany of the later books own shortcomings cluster around this theme.In the process, a kind of countercanon is constructed. In one place alist isgiven of the Indian subaltern studieshistorians, Salman Rushdie,



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Gabriel Garca Mrquez, George Lamming, Sergio Ramirez, Ngugi WaThiongo, Faiz Ahmad Faiz, Mahmud Darwish, Aim Csaire, FrantzFanon, Amilcar Cabral, Syed Hussein Alatas, C. L. R. James, Ali Shari-ati, Eqbal Ahmad, Abdullah Laroui, and Omar Cabezas (Said 1988a,ixx).

Very many of the otherwise notably heterogeneous Third Worldwriters and activists thus listed were in some sense or for some partof their careers self-avowed Marxists. Within this pantheon, a fewWgures particularly stand out: James, whose work has a special im-portance for my own (Said 1992a; see also 1989b); Csaire; and above

all Fanon. The latter pair are, as types, held up to be models orrepresentations of human effort in the contemporary world (Said1989a, 22425; and see 1988b, 8, 1617, 20). As Henry Louis Gatesgrumbles, this means that Said, having called for a recognition of the situatedness of all discourses, then presents Fanon as a globaltheorist in vacuo . . . emptied of his own speciWcity (Gates 1991, 459).The same desire to produce a politically usable past may account forSaids forced reading of Yeats, and on a wider scale for the somewhatManichaean interpretations of Middle East politics into which he hasfrequently and no doubt understandably in his more polemical moodsslipped. These tendencies are in constant tension with the more care-ful, nuanced mode of much of his other writing, a mode in which hewill recognize profound shortcomings in Arab, and Palestinian, polit-ical culture (e.g., 1993a, 3045, 36162; 2001) or express considerableskepticism about all nationalist projects.

Evidently enough, such simple stages theories cannot providean adequate general explanation for the relationship between colo-nialism, anticolonial nationalism, and other ideologies either moreinclusive (Saids politics of liberation) or less so (racism, nativism,tribalism, communalism). Quite likely they do not work even for anyone particular case. We need to specify far more closely the particularforms and trajectories of politics and consciousness in each individualcolonial or postcolonial situation. This must include close investiga-

tion of the ways in which communal or sectarian politics are createdand mobilized. And these colonial and postcolonial discourse theoriessince Said too often have utterly failed to do. Once again, Saids cen-tral complaint about orientalist thoughtthat it establishes dichot-omizing, 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 oppositionaltheory. And major parts of Saids own work, though certainly by nomeans all of it, share that crucial fault.

Moreover, Saids list of places where the larger search for libera-tion has been strongestsupposedly those where the nationalistaccomplishment had been either checked or greatly delayedis oddand even seems rather arbitrary, like so many of his listings of author-ities or events. It comprises Algeria, Guinea, Palestine, sections of the Islamic andArab world, and South Africa (1993a, 264). The omis-

sion of India, surely among the most productive sites of postcolonialliberationist thought of every kind, is extraordinary. There seems, bycontrast, no very evident reason to privilege Algeria or Palestine,except that they are cases with which Said is especially familiar. Andif by Guinea is meant Guine-Bissau, as is probable (for to make sucha claim about the tyrannized intellectual wastelands of exFrenchGuinea or Equatorial Guinea would be sadly grotesque), this can only be on the tenuous grounds of Amilcar Cabrals solitary eminence inits nationalist movement.

All this writing, Said suggests, has had a distinctively combativeedge even when framed in the genres of academic scholarship. This is because these writers think of themselves as emissaries to Westernculture representing a political freedom and accomplishment as yetunfulWlled,blocked, postponed(312). Oppositional, postcolonial writ-ings do not merely comment on anticolonial struggles, they belongsquarely 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 anti-colonial violencehas been interrogation of Frantz Fanons legacy.16Thus it is appropriate that Said concludes his longest discussion of anticolonial cultures of resistance by an extended engagement withFanons thought. As he says, Fanons importance for his case lies inhis having more dramatically and decisively than anyone expressed

the immense cultural shift from the terrain of nationalist indepen-dence 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, lessfamiliarly, intriguing speculations about his af Wliations with Lukcs



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(1993a, 32627; see also 1999, where the admittedly speculative argu-ment about Fanons debt to Lukcs is considerably elaborated). Yetarguably he not only dehistoricizes and decontextualizes Fanonswork, as Gates had suggested, casting him as prophetic genius (328) but, even in all his stress on the complexity of Fanons thought, heends up producing a Fanon radically remodeled to suit his own pur-poses. For many of the ideas against which Said had polemicized innationalist thought can be found also in Fanon, and these Said slidespast in silence. Although Fanon himself had of course never been apure or simple nationalist, let alone what Said calls a nativist, there

are far more, and more powerful, currents of identitarian and culturalnationalist rhetoric in Fanons work (mainly, but far from only, theearlier work) than Said allows.

Such identitarian rhetoricswhether or not we can see Fanon aslater breaking decisively with themtend, as Said stresses, to repro-duce essentialized images of the West just as routinely, and as mis-leadingly, as they do those of the Orient, the colonial subject, andso on. Sometimes the creation of self-referring myths is explicit; no-where more so than in the long tradition of writing about a phantas-mic America; whether this imagined space is deplored or celebrated.In many eyes, including it often seemed Saids own, this fault wasespecially prevalent in the Arab and Islamic worlds. The stakes indebate here, and their relationship to Marxism, may well be illustrated by reference to two other Arab scholars who have both related inti-mately to Marxism and engaged closely and critically with Saidswork: Syrian Sadiq Jalal al-Azm and Palestinian Hisham Sharabi.

In his Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse, al-Azm makestwo especially important, closely related criticisms of Said, apart fromalso raising many of the same complaints on issues like epistemolog-ical ambiguity that other critics have raised. First, Said fails to iden-tify the really crippling fault of many of the writers he analyzes andattacks, which is their profoundly ahistorical frame of mind (al-Azm1984, 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 sociopsycho-logical patterns to make such claims as that the Unseen was always(and always will be) more immediate and real to the Orientals thanto 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 otherswhom Said comprehensively denounces.

Al-Azms second main charge is that Said underrates and, in hisprocedures and emphases, indeed tends to encourage an Oriental-ism 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, some-times self-denigrating ones, sometimes self-glorifying. These are, al-Azm 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-Azmscritique is, in fact, not so far distant from some of Saids own emphasesas might be thought. One aspect of the Orientalism in reverse thatal-Azm castigates, the lack of curiosity or sustained investigation of the West in contemporary Arab and Muslim worlds and the conse-quent often basic misunderstandings of European, U.S., or indeedIsraeli societies, has frequently been highlighted in Saids writings.

How far has Marxist thought in the Arab world provided excep-tions to this dispiriting picture? As Hisham Sharabilike Said, aPalestinian scholar long resident in the United Statesargued, Arabfeminist cultural critique has been far bolder than that of opposi-tional Arab intellectuals in its confrontation with received theoreticalmodels, including Marxism. Yet, although orthodox Marxism in theArab world has been (as Said too has repeatedly complained) a prettyarid, derivative, and formulaic affair, a more diffuse Marxist inXu-ence has had more creative consequences. Many of the most impres-sive critical voices in Arab social thought,Wgures like al-Azm, Barakat,Khatibi, Laroui, Mernissi, and Sharabi, owe a great deal to Marxisttheory and sometimes to a speciWcally Marxist initial intellectual for-mation, even if few of them would in their later, most inXuentialwork describe themselves unequivocally as Marxists. Poststructuralist,postmodernist, and deconstructive thought have had their inXuence

in Arab intellectual circles, too; as one might expect, such inX

uence ismost marked in the Maghrebian countries where French culturalpresence is strongest. They include theorists like Muhammad Ark-oun, whose main focus has been on a critique of religious thoughtheavily inXuenced by Foucault, Heidegger, and Castoriadis (Arkoun



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1984; 1985), and Moroccan Abdelkabir Khatibi (1983; 1985). Khatibisdeployment of deconstructive and poststructuralist concepts is in-tended to mount a dual challenge: a double criticism against boththe traditionalist Arab social thought which Sharabi (1988) called neo-patriarchal, and the essentially imitative appropriations among Arabintellectuals of mainstream Western social science (in which Khatibiwould include the uses and abuses of Marxism).

Such critical approaches in Middle Eastern contexts do not onlyface the general dif Wculties of cross-cultural translation but, as Sharabiand others have argued, may encounter under the conditions of Arab

political culture an intensiWed version of poststructuralisms politi-cal double-bind. That is, on the one hand the critics tend to adopt ahighly didactic, politically polemical tone that, owing much to thefrequently overheated rhetorical nature of contemporary Arab debate,necessarily delimits the horizon of theory by often imposing prescrip-tive considerations (Sharabi 1988, 122). On the other hand, paradox-ically and yet more damagingly, the tendencies of poststructuralistand postmodernist thought, both formalistic and atomizing, rob it of real political effects, all the more so inArab contexts where, as Sharabiurges, a viewof social totality, seeking to unite fragmented oppositions,is needed: What is the point of naming the oppressed, the marginal-ized, the humiliated, if the enterprise stops at an abstract gesture? . . .If, in the context of late industrial society, post-structuralist anar-chism provides the illusion of the play of freedom and plurality, theprimary need in authoritarian neopatriarchal society goes beyondanarchisms delight in deconstructive plays . . . deconstructive criti-cism ends up being a fragmented project unable to provide clearpolitical purpose (12324). The congruence between these preoccu-pations and Saidsnot least in a shared concern at the political con-sequences of much contemporary radical theorywill be obvious.

More orthodox or traditional forms of Marxism in the MiddleEast, however, have in most analysts eyes (including, again, Saids) been considerably more sterile still. Much of thisArab (or indeed Iran-

ian, Turkish, Israeli, and other) Marxism, and certainly those parts thatcaught Saids eye, was highly activist rather than academic or theo-reticist, and closely linked to the programs of communist and otherleft parties in the region. Its contribution in terms of sustained or orig-inal social analysis was extremely limited. The crude and skin-deep



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(Sayigh 1997, 23237) Marxism of the Palestinian Popular Front, forinstance, fully justiWed Saids judgment that Marxism in the Arabworlddid not gobeyond Russian models of the 1920s and 1930s (1992b,26061). In some more restricted senses, however, Saids view wasperhaps unfairly bleak. In particular, his repeated emphasis on thefailure of Palestinians effectively to represent themselves, to presentauthoritative narratives of their own past, greatly underestimated theachievement of increasingly numerous Palestinian (and indeed left-ish Israeli) social historians, many of them strongly Marxist inXu-enced, 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 moreconvinced that narrative as such had a central politico-ethical value.Already in Orientalism he had suggestednot entirely consistentlywith much else in the bookthat the very idea of narrative, of tellinga story, as opposed to a static, panoptic vision, undermines ori-entalisms essentializing and denigrating ideas about non-Westernpeoples. 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 impe-rialist systems, then that contradiction may be resolved by makingexplicit what I think Said implies: that it is speciWcally historicalnarrative that has these potentially liberating functions. Saids turnagainst Foucault, against contemporary literary theory, and againstpoststructuralist and postmodernist visions is thus in the end aboveall a turn to history, both in the sense of attention to the complex,changing, detail of human experience and in the sense that narrativesof historical change can (or, Said seems sometimes to imply, againstthe academic spirit of the age, necessarily do) carry messages of progress and emancipation. In that, he came very close once moreto classical Marxist themes and beliefs, especially those that posedMarxism as key heir to the Enlightenment.

For Said, like Adorno but unlike Foucault and unlike many of thelater colonial discourse theorists, the intellectual still hasor couldhavea degree of autonomy frompolitical power. Said insists, then, onthe importance of the individual authors responsibility. She or he canchoose to write and act in politically responsible and emancipatory



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ways. The institutions of academia and intellectual production arenot inherently bound to the service of imperialism, though they canchoose to betray their true avocation and become its servantsandin the United States, he says, they usually have done so. Such subor-dination will then mean that the knowledge produced from these sitesis imperialist, obfuscatory, and oppressive. But that comes from theinstitutional or personal choice, not (at least in the main) from the in-herent limits of discourse itself. Indeed, Said frequently describes theprocess by which false, distorting, and oppressive images of the Otherare generated in distinctly materialist and even instrumentalist terms,

with reference to patterns of media ownership, governmental, busi-ness, and military funding of academia and research foundations, thematerial beneWts to be gained from conformity, and so on (1978, 284302, 32125; 1982; 1990a, 79). Again, this distances him quite sharply both from such mentors as Adorno and Foucault, and from subse-quent theorists who are more despairing about the possibilities of effective resistance, and more single-mindedly textualist, than Saidhas 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 inXu-enced by him.

In his most politically engaged texts, especially those concernedwith contemporary events and above all those on Palestinian ques-tions, Said goes further, wholly abandoning the poststructuralist andtextualist ground to mount arguments of a straightforwardly realist,even empiricist kind. He will in such registers argue: The starkestmedia 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 ishere taken for granted that this is a deplorable state of affairs; whereashe had seemed to many critics to be adopting a stance very like thathimself in Orientalism.

That strand of Saids thought and of his political engagement is

a sign, perhaps, of the most central, enduring, if largely subterra-nean impact of Marxism on him. It is certainly an indicator that hisproclaimed anti-anti-Marxism indicated something more substan-tive than a mere gesture of refusal. For, in a great deal of contempo-rary postcolonialist theoretical and culturalist writing, what proclaims



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itself as post-Marxist is often, more simply, anti-Marxist. The near-inescapable other side of that coin is that criticism of such theorizing(except where the critic is self-proclaimedly reactionary) is simplyassumed to be proceeding from Marxistor rather, vulgar Marxistpremises. This has all too often meant a crude homogenizing of themultiple strands of Marxist thought into a single set of claims, forwhich such phrases as modes of production narrative are routinelyused, and which is supposed without argument or proof to be out-dated or superseded (whether by the coming of the postmodern or thecollapse of the Soviet Union).17 And, in parallel fashion, what calls

itself the postcolonial is often, rhetorically and sentimentally, wantingto announce its anticolonialism, with the consequence that accountsskeptical of its particular protocols or assertions are taken to beand denounced asapologetics for colonialism.

Sudipta Kaviraj (1992, 95) is perhaps right to argue that classi-cal Marxists typically tended to hail too uncritically the penetrationof a superWcial, predatory travesty of capitalism into the colonialworld and to overestimate that capitalisms capacity to remake tra-ditional rural societies. But conversely, much contemporary radicalThird Worldist theory (though not, on the whole, Kavirajs ownwork) swings to the opposite extreme on both counts. Orthodox SovietMarxism became deeply marked by its encounter with Third World-ism and with a romanticor Slavophilenotion of cultural essences.This produced two contradictory tendencies, often both held in per-manent tension within the same minds and political discourses: aneconomistic and progressivist modes of production narrative and aromantic culturalism. Some contemporary postcolonial and ThirdWorldist political thought, drawing eclectic comfort from fragmentsof postmodernist and poststructural theory, has identiWed theWrst of these as the original sin of Western socialismwith which it hasidentiWed Marxism. In fact this tendency had quite different and moreEastern roots, some of which can be traced to Lenins thought andthe 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 operat-ing, often half-hidden but hegemonic, within socialist and Marxistthought, especially thought in, and about, the postcolonial world. Inother words, what Third Worldist cultural nationalists and their more



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modish successors, postmodernist culturalists, have identiWed as thegreat error of Marxismits supposed imperializing rationalismhasactually not been the dominant strand of Marxism in the Third World.There, as in Western colonialism itself, it has been romantic national-ism that has prevailed and been responsible for most of the errors andcrimes now conventionally laid to rationalisms account. EdwardSaids work returned repeatedly, and with repeated ambivalence, tothese issues and dilemmas. Insofar as his Wnal message lay on therationalist, universalist, and humanist side of the great division, thenwe 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 shouldperhaps alsobe noted that the quoted passage fromBrennan isnottypical 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 allof literary and philosophical works. By the 1980s almost all the subjects were polit-ical ones, mainly on the Middle East; though he continued occasionally to reviewliterary works (especially by Arab writers) and, increasingly, books on music.

3. Abdirahman Hussein suggests that the essays in The World, the Text, andthe Critic mark a distinct shift toward engagement with and inXuences from Marx-ism: a mid-career stock-taking [which] involves a shift of emphasis from struc-turalisty/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 veryidea of secularism is a product of Europe and thus (in what is by now an over-familiar complaint) perhaps arrogantly particularist if not implicitly colonialist.Some admirers of Said have, perhaps for these reasons, preferred to emphasizeanother term he sometimes uses to capture much of the same complex of ideas,that is, worldly criticism (see especially Ashcroft and Ahluwalia 1999; Brennan1997). For an extended argument that Saids notion of secularism is ambiguousand inconsistent, and his own work suffused with unavowed or displaced reli-gious themes, see William D. Harts 2000 book.

5. It has occasionally been suggested (e.g., Richardson 1990, 1718) that inthus shifting the locus of Marxs comment Said was making a depoliticizing oreven a dishonest move. This is clearly unfairalthough it might still be said thatsuch charges stick in relation to much subsequent, Said-inXuenced writing incolonial cultural studies, which does tend to reduce all politics to a matter of con-tending cultural representations.



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6. Said 1978, 1536. Among many critiques of Saids treatment of Marx onIndia, see for instance Nimtz 2002 and Jani 2002.

7. See, for instance, the critique in Lazarus 1999, 13940. Still, Said here asin so many contexts makes a far less extreme case than some of those claiminginspiration from him have done. For an argument that the only true anticolonial-ists were a few great imaginative writers, see Kiberd 1995.

8. Throughout the book and associated writings Said is also silently reject-ingindeed never once refers tothe Leninist deWnition of imperialism as being,or appertaining to, a particular stage in capitalist development. Whatever thenuances of Saids relationship to Marxism, he has nothing in common with post-1917 orthodox communist theories of imperialism.

9. For an example of Gramscis continuing importance for Said near theend of his life, see his presentation of the Italians ideas to Palestinian students atBir 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 dis-cusses Saids relationship to Gramsci at some length (2000, 3137), but her accountis vitiated by a misreading of the Gramscian concept of hegemony as referring toone states, rather than one classs, domination over another.

10. The latter allusion is presumably mainly to Leopardi, especially as inter-preted by Sebastiano Timpanaro.

11. This essay, originally addressed to an Egyptian audience, is probablySaids longest single engagement with Marxist writers (Raymond Williams alsofeatures heavily in it). See also his Invention, Memory, and Place (2000a), whichlinks defense of obscured and mutilated memory against the claims of inventedtradition and of Wcial history with another insistence on the centrality of a senseof place and of space in critical social theory.

12. Whether or how far Williams should be regarded as a Marxist is a com-plex, perhaps again not intrinsically important, but not uninteresting matter, onwhich 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 af Wrmative 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 onOrientalism. The inXuence is certainly there, and Brennan is acloser reader of Saidswork than almost any other commentator on it, but there are only two passing ref-erences to Williams in Orientalism, neither of them to The Country and the Citythe work suggested to have been Saids main source. The direct engagement withWilliamss writings only comes rather later in Saids career.

14. Perhaps surprisingly, Asha Varadharajan (1995) has made an extendedattempt to employ Adornos thought (which she believes Said has used in a ten-dentious, indeed, reductive style [130]) as a basis for negative, if nuanced andrespectful, criticism of Saids. A more af Wrmative linking of the two theorists ismade in Dallmayr 1997.

15. In this, Said somewhat misunderstood Andersons argument, which at



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that stage in his own intellectual trajectory was far more af Wrmative toward theclassical Marxist tradition, especially in its Trotskyist variant, than toward theWestern one; although it is true that, then and later, Anderson almost entirelyneglected nonNorth Atlantic thought. In what follows I use the term ThirdWorld despite its now apparent semi-obsolescence, since it (more than, say, post-colonial) is so much used by the writers alluded to, including Said himself.

16. Fanons relationship to Marxism is little less complex, and little if anyless debated, than that involved in Williamss longer career. Again the debate can-not be summarized or even referenced here, but it may fairly uncontroversially besaid that Fanons thought was considerably more Marxist in his last book thanin his Wrst.

17. A strong case can be made, on the basis especially of Marxs scatteredcomments on Russian development in his last years, for arguing that even if a uni-linear story of world development is inherent in his major work, he had substan-tially rethought and at least partly rejected that stance before the end (see Shanin1984).

Works Cited

Adorno, Theodor W. 1973. Philosophy of Modern Music. London: Seabury Press.Ahmad, Aijaz. 1992. In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures. London: Verso.al-Azm, Sadiq Jalal. 1984. Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse. In Forbidden

Agendas, ed. Khamsin. London: al-Saqi.Althusser, Louis, and tienne Balibar. 1970. Reading Capital. Trans. Ben Brewster.

London: Verso.Anderson, Perry. 1976. Considerations on Western Marxism. London: Verso.Arkoun, Mohammad. 1984. Pour une critique de la raison islamique. Paris: Maison-

neuve et Larose.. 1985. Rethinking Islam. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown Center for Contem-

porary Arab Studies.Ashcroft, Bill, and Pal A

Documents

78 Howe Edward Said and Marxism.pdf