Yet at the same time you have spoken out against the corporatization of the university.
My interest in that really goes back to the 1960S, when it was revealed to me that the university was being used for projects that had to do with conquest and with the penetration of other societies. I discovered through reading that this goes back to the First World War. There’s a book by Carol Gruber called Mars and Minerva. It describes how the university was converted into an instrument of national defense during World War I. She describes the role played by people like John Dewey and others who were getting people fired because they weren’t anti-German enough. There’s a long history of those abuses of the university, both by the Left and the Right. I think what is happening is that we are losing our autonomy more and more.
I’m currently reviewing a book called Who Paid the Piper? by Frances Stonor Saunders, which is quite extraordinary. All the academic luminaries of the 1950s and 1960s, especially on the East Coast—Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Hardwick, Sidney Hook, Irving Kristol, and Lionel Trilling—were involved in the politicization of knowledge, that is, actively involved in the Cold War with CIA money and support. It’s one of the great facts of history. The question is: Can one formulate a valid humanism, one that has to do with knowledge, rigor, commitment to pedagogy, and yet remain committed to citizenship in society? How does one, as an intellectual, do that? How do we define a humanism in a situation that is very embattled, where the world is creeping in on it?
That question seems to be an elaboration of the idea of noncoercive, non-dominative knowledge that you articulated in Orientalism.
Yes, exactly. If we examine this notion of noncoercive knowledge systematically in the context of problems such as globalization, corporate intervention, violence, the politics of identity, the end of the Cold War, then is it possible to speak about a humanistic, language-based vocation? I think it is. I’ve never felt that my own interest in literature and literary issues has been a hindrance to me. I’ve never longed to have been a political scientist. Literary study entails a kind of rigor. There exists an old, interesting, and very rich tradition that doesn’t have any value today. By tradition I don’t mean only in the past, back in the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, but a tradition that continues through the work of the great philologists of the nineteenth century: Alexander von Humboldt, Silvestre de Sacy, Mommsen, and later, people like Curtius, Spitzer, and Auerbach, and the great French scholars like Massignon. I think that it is important to renew that tradition.
And you think that that can only take place inside the university?
It is very difficult for me to imagine it elsewhere because the university is in a sense a protected space. Without wishing to romanticize the university, the university is the last remaining protected space. Of course, the university is in cahoots with the corporate world and the military. There is no question about it. But that isn’t all there is. One has to go back to Raymond Williams’s saying: no matter how exhausted the social and political situation is, you can’t exhaust all the alternatives. Other alternatives probably could exist outside the university for a leisured class. But where else could it exist? It could happen in seminaries, I suppose. But the university as a protected space can offer a response that is sustained by the very traditions that we are losing rapidly.
In a sense, this sounds like Adorno’s distinction between autonomous art and committed art, found in his essay “Commitment,” where Adorno privileges the former over the latter. Is autonomy to be preserved before commitment?
For Adorno, the power of the art—which is primarily music—lies in its dialectical opposition to the society it is in. He understands that there is a kind of standoff between the work of art and society. The role of the philosopher and the critic is to highlight this dialectical opposition between the autonomous art and society. The problem with that is that once you highlight that opposition, that irreconcilable tension, art loses its autonomy, since the critic uses art for a social purpose. The position is then a very difficult one, and I don’t know if it can be sustained all the way.
Without being too metaphysical, what I find valuable in Adorno is this notion of tension, of highlighting and dramatizing what I call irreconcilabilities. These irreconcilabilities are always experiential; they are not metaphysical. For me, they go back to the contested geography of Palestine, and they refer to the whole question of partition. How, for instance, do you deal with more than one people who say that this is our land? The habitual, imperial legacy has been what they call “divide and quit.” You leave a place, but then you divide it, as the English did in India, as they did in Palestine, as they did in Ireland, as they did in Cyprus, and as NATO and the United States is now doing in the Balkans. There are many examples. To my mind partition hasn’t worked. What I’m proposing is to go back to these geographies and to these irreconcilabilities that they represent, and suggest that we start from there and accept them and build around them, instead of saying let’s just curtain it off and say this is my part and this is your part. I’m interested in that midpoint where there is that overlap.
The nature of experience is, in fact, overlapping. There is no way, for example, of writing Israeli history without Palestinian history, and vice versa. There is no way of writing Northern Irish history without the Republican point of view. That’s why I’m interested in the work of the Subaltern Studies Collective, the Field Day group, and the work of people who are trying to deal with these irreconcilabilities in imaginative ways, either by looking at precisely those things that get left out for which there is no written history or documents. That’s where Ranajit Guha begins his work. The history of India is really the history of people who never wrote the history. It’s not the colonial history, nor is it the history of the Gandhis or the Nehrus. It’s that rather peculiar space that interests me.
So the role of the intellectual is to emphasize these irreconcilabilities?
I think that this does define the role of the intellectual. To me it is very fruitful because it enables me to see the intellectual as clarifying and dramatizing the irreconcilabilities of a particular situation, rather than trying to say, as a policy maker would or as someone like Thomas Friedman says, that globalization is the answer for everything. Adorno is a very powerful corrective to that kind of impulse. Especially in situations that are no longer easily rectified by policy solutions, it seems to me that the role of the intellectual is to give these situations a voice, to try to articulate them, to try to clarify them so that one knows on what ground one is treading.
Yet the tension over the intellectual’s role—that is to say, between autonomy and commitment—is a tension that may exist in your own specific work and experiences. In other words, has there been a shift in the way you conceive of the role of the intellectual, from commitment to a constitutency to the autonomous, exiled traveler? From the mid-1980s to perhaps the fall of 1991, you had written often about the need for intellectuals to affiliate themselves directly with political causes. Your history with the Palestinian national struggle bears this out, as well as your work with the PNC. And, also at the end of the Gulf War, you said in an interview that “there is only one way to anchor yourself, and that is by affiliation with a cause, with a political movement. . . . This seems to me to be the number one priority. There’s nothing else.” Yet, in Representations of the Intellectual, you use the figure of the exiled traveler as the quintessential modern intellectual. Has your idea of the intellectual changed since Oslo?
I don’t think so. I can’t be sure that there aren’t inconsistencies and contradictions. But consciously at least I feel that it is the same thing. By accepting the American terms of the Madrid conference, which came after the Gulf War and after Arafat’s alliance with Saddam Hussein (which, by the way, he now denies), the PNC was no longer representative of the Palestinian people.
During the summer of 1991, I was involved with a group of people including Hanan Ashrawi, Faisal Husseini, Nabil Shaath, and others, to f
ormulate the assurances that we as Palestinians required from the Americans as our entry into the Madrid process. Our conditions were fairly stringent. We stated what our minimum requirements were; Secretary of State James Baker was to guarantee them. Baker had asked Arafat for this. We put down a reasonable set of proposals: we wouldn’t accept anything less than the end of the occupation, for example; we wouldn’t accept anything less than the end of the settlement and the settlement process. These were perfectly normal things. But what I also found out was that when these requirements were sent to the Americans, Arafat simply canceled them all. He more or less made it clear to the Israelis and the Americans that he had no conditions. He just wanted to be in on the process. These were all part of the reasons that I felt I had to quit the PNC. This was why I also felt that by accepting these conditions, Arafat was in effect no longer representing the Palestinian people, whom I considered to be more important than the immediate survival of the PLO under his chairmanship.
Arafat’s a very shrewd, tactical politician. He had all the mechanisms of the PLO under his command, and, more importantly, in his pay. There were many people who resigned from the PLO central council and from the executive committee, like Mahmoud Darwish, Shafik Al-Hout, and Abdullah Hourani. Lots of people were in a state of acute anxiety. But I was very much in the minority when I started to write publicly against the PLO in the latter part of 1993 after Oslo was announced. Technically, I was not part of a political movement in the real sense of the word, nor was I touting myself as a real alternative to the PLO. Yet I felt I was acting in affiliation with a lot of Palestinians who were disenfranchised. For example, there were all the refugees who were simply swept out of the agreement.
Since that time, I felt that I have had an independent function, and that I do speak for a constituency. I am not officially representative of anything; I remain independent. But I still feel that my affiliation is with the majority of Palestinians who are not inside Gaza and the West Bank. For the first time in our history, there are more Palestinians outside Palestine than there are inside. Though Arafat banned my books in 1996, they’re still sold, and even some of the local papers, when they feel they can get away with it, publish my articles. I have a constituency, and I feel that I am attached to a movement. The problem is that it’s not a very clear movement. It’s not a movement with leaders and parties. I’ve had to act very much from outside the official opposition that sits in Damascus, the eight or ten, whatever they’re called, the Popular Front and the Popular Democratic Front, among others. I have nothing to do with them. I consider them to be as irrelevant as the man on the moon. But I feel there are efforts made, here and there, in the last two, three years, in the West Bank, in Gaza, in Lebanon, in Jordan, in the United States, with which I’ve been associated, and to which I have given my name. For example, there has recently been an effort in Gaza to create a popular party. Eyad Sarraj asked me if I would join; I said yes. Azmi Bishara asked me if I would affiliate myself with his campaign. I did. In that sense, I am affiliated. I am not afraid of publicly identifying myself. I think the situation is roughly the same, although the situation on the ground has changed. But I don’t think I’ve really changed.
I am constantly asked by Palestinians who are close to Arafat, including Arab foreign ministers, to declare a truce with Arafat and to make up with him for the sake of unity. He and his people have tried several times to bring us together. I’ve told them that I have no interest in doing this. I think he’s irrelevant because it’s not as if he has a large area in which he can maneuver. He’s a prisoner of the process; he’s a prisoner of the Israelis; he’s a prisoner of the Americans. Any rapprochement I would have with him I told him I’d be happy to do in public, on a stage where we’d debate the issues. Of course, there was no question that he would ever accept that. When the whole question of loyalty is put to me, I say, well, I think I’m more loyal to the cause than he is. Now the argument is that with the onset of Barak’s premiership, these are the most important times since 1993, and maybe something will come of it since the Syrians are involved. They had asked me to moderate my critique. I didn’t respond. I write what I feel like writing. I’m not going to be bound by any limitations of that sort. As the events unfold, I’ll comment on them.
Never solidarity before criticism.
No, of course not. Look what it got them!
However, in our unipolar world, resistance to oppression appears more and more difficult considering the power of the United States and the clamor to belong to the world market. How does one go about theorizing power and formulating resistance today?
I think it’s in the nature of power to stand its hegemony, as Gramsci said, over more and more territory. Hegemony is all about permanent contest. It’s a war of position to acquire more and more territory, and part of what the United States has done has been to spread an ideological blanket over discourse everywhere. To say that you’re either for “the West,” “the market,” or “globalization” is formulaic and has a certain instant appeal to it. One has to deconstruct that. Second, there are precedents available to us in international law, in the documents and protocols signed by nearly every country in the world since the end of World War II: the Geneva Convention, the Vienna Treaty on nonintervention, the Declaration of Human Rights, etc. It’s not as if we’re sailing in a sea without a compass. There are enough of these that one has to recall. It’s an effort at memory that has to be made, since hegemony effectively effaces memory and says it’s all bunk. What counts is what we say. There has to be an act of resistance by recollection.
Third, you have to be able to connect the specific episodes to other episodes so that you can see, for example, that NATO’s intervention in Yugoslavia exists against the background of what NATO has done historically. Ethnic cleansing has been very much within the province of NATO itself, not outside of NATO, if you consider Turkey and other places where people have been driven out. These are all within the realm of Europe and NATO, and of course the United States itself. You can’t lay the blame on the non-European and the non-American. NATO itself has a fantastic load of guilt and responsibility to bear. One has to connect NATO’s current action with its own past, which is obscured, and, of course, with the whole history of American behavior towards “inferior others,” whether it’s in Guatemala, in Colombia, or in Indonesia.
The next step has to be to attract like-minded people who are necessarily separated by geographical distance and who are operating in different environments. To find out where opposition exists and to draw attention to it. One of the important aspects of the Kosovo crisis, which was obscured by this hegemony, is that there was strong opposition to Milosevic prior to NATO’s bombing campaign, which began on March 24, 1999. As a result of NATO’s intervention, political opposition to Milosevic was either destroyed or voluntarily turned its support over to him because this was a war against the whole of Yugoslavia, not just the Milosevic regime. One has to talk about democratic alternatives as well as nonmilitary alternatives to the war. I think that’s terribly important, and that wasn’t done. That was the failure of the whole intellectual class that participated in the media. Analysts and former military people did not shed light on what was happening, but consolidated support in the mass media.
It seems to me that one of the effects of that hegemony was that a lot of people on the Left who opposed the war—
It was a neoliberal war. It was a war of the Left, of the so-called conventional Left.
Right. And there were very few numbers of the American Left intellectuals who opposed the war—
Not only in America but also in Europe. A German intellectual called what was happening a form of military humanism. What an outrage! Think of it. It wasn’t just the Americans. It was the Europeans too. In The New Yorker (August 2, 1999) there is an article by Michael Ignatieff that says that this was a “risk-free war.” There’s nothing in his analysis to suggest that it was immoral and destructive and that it was waged at the expense
of ordinary people, many of whom opposed Milosevic.
It was a curious moment in the United States, at least, when the Left found themselves in the company with many on the Right. Jack Kemp called the bombing of Yugoslavia “an international Waco.”
Did you see the advertisement in The New York Times that called on the president to intensify the war in Kosovo by introducing ground troops? The ad said they weren’t going far enough. It said that “we” weren’t up to it. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Susan Sontag, Norman Podhoretz, David Rieff, Jeane Kirkpatrick—they all signed it. Who would have thought that Susan Sontag, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and David Rieff would all be on the same side in the war?
What does this convergence of neoliberalism and conservatism signify?
It’s what is happening in Britain and the United States, where the so-called liberal wing of the polity has become virtually identified with the conservative or centrist wing. That’s been the post-Cold War policy of all neoliberal parties, so-called Left parties in the West, to transform themselves into something where ideology no longer counts, where the values of the Left, which were always based on unions and decent health and social policies for everyone and a kind of equitable as opposed to an invidious tax policy, has been transformed into a kind of consumerist ideology that says it’s liberal, but, in fact, is deeply reactionary and is taking back all the advances that were made in the postwar period by the welfare state. What you’re getting is the replacement of the public sector by free enterprise, which is in my opinion deeply antidemocratic, and deeply ominous to the future, because if everything is going to be left to the market and to market forces, then the deprived, the disadvantaged, and the peripheral are going to have no chances whatsoever. That is the immediate challenge. The silence of the Left, or at least the traditional Left, is very ominous. It is clear that one has to look for alternatives not in the ranks of the traditional Democratic party, but elsewhere, perhaps among immigrant populations and the feminist movement. One has to be creative and look for sustenance and support in some other places that the Left has tended to forget.
The Edward Said Reader Page 55