Edward Said

Bill Ashcroft, Pal Ahluwalia

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• eBook ISBN: 9781134022786
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Edward Said is perhaps best known as the author of the landmark study Orientalism, a book which changed the face of critical theory and shaped the emerging field of post-colonial studies, and for his controversial journalism on the Palestinian political situation.

Looking at the context and the impact of Said's scholarship and journalism, this book examines Said's key ideas, including:

• the significance of 'worldliness', 'amateurism', 'secular criticism', 'affiliation' and 'contrapuntal reading'
• the place of text and critic in 'the world'
• knowledge, power and the construction of the 'Other'
• links between culture and imperialism
• exile, identity and the plight of Palestine
• a new chapter looking at Said's later work and style

This popular guide has been fully updated and revised in a new edition, suitable for readers approaching Said's work for the first time as well as those already familiar with the work of this important theorist. The result is the ideal guide to one of the twentieth century's most engaging critical thinkers.

KEY IDEAS

1
WORLDLINESS

THE TEXT

Edward Said is perhaps most familiar to readers as the author of Orientalism (1978) and as a leading exponent of the growing study of post-colonial literatures and cultures. But we can only fully understand this better-known aspect of his work when we grasp his view of the role of the intellectual in contemporary society and the function of criticism itself. Although Orientalism is the book which more than any other has cemented Said’s reputation, it is the collection of theoretical essays, The World, the Text and the Critic (Said 1983), which provides the lens through which his work can be read most profitably, the key to his significance to contemporary cultural theory.

In the main, the essays comprising this volume were written before the publication of Orientalism and reveal the emergence of the methodology and the concerns which have underpinned all Said’s work. The World, the Text and the Critic provides the most systematic and accessible entry to those concerns which had been established in Said’s work since 1975 when he published Beginnings, a book which, as Timothy Brennan acknowledges, ‘records that broad-ranging but also limited list of motifs that occupy Said for the better part of his career’ (Brennan 1992: 75). The consistency of Said’s work has been remarkable. But this consistency and the wide-ranging scope of his interests have been obscured by two things: the dominance of post-structuralism in textual analysis over the past two decades, a theoretical movement with which Said’s relationship has been one of regular interrogation and disagreement; and the extraordinary prominence of Orientalism in his reputation as a cultural critic. In The World, the Text and the Critic, then, we find a systematic elaboration of those broad interests which underlie and inform these better-known aspects of his work.

Edward Said is often considered to be the originator of colonial discourse theory, a form of theoretical investigation which, when taken up by Homi K. Bhabha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, became sometimes erroneously regarded as synonymous with ‘post-colonial theory’ (see ‘Post-colonialism’ in Ashcroft et al. 2007). But if we look closely at The World, the Text and the Critic, a much more materialist and worldly Said emerges, one who reminds us of Italian philosopher (1668–1744) Giambattista Vico’s admonition that ‘human history is made up by human beings’ (cited in Said 1995a: 331). Said’s employment of Michel Foucault’s notion of discourse, which we will talk about in the next chapter, has become widely known and both emulated and criticised for its partial use of Foucault’s theory. But Said’s analyses cannot be understood properly without a perception of his view of the worldliness of the text, and the function of criticism and of the intellectual. Said took as much of Foucault as he needed, but the great imbalance in power in the world in which texts are produced makes their worldliness crucial.

DISCOURSE, COLONIAL DISCOURSE THEORY AND POST-COLONIAL THEORY

A discourse is a system of statements within which and by which the world can be known. Rather than referring to ‘speech’ in the traditional sense, Foucault’s notion of discourse is a firmly bounded area of social knowledge. For him, the world is not simply ‘there’ to be talked about, rather it is discourse itself within which the world comes into being. It is also in such a discourse that speakers and hearers, writers and readers, come to an understanding about themselves, their relationship to each other and their place in the world (the construction of subjectivity). It is that complex of signs and practices that organises social existence and social reproduction, which determines how experiences and identities are categorised.

Colonial discourse theory is that theory which analyses the discourse of colonialism and colonisation; which demonstrates the way in which such discourse obscures the underlying political and material aims of colonisation; and which points out the deep ambivalences of that discourse as well as the way in which it constructs both colonising and colonised subjects.

Post-colonial theory investigates, and develops propositions about, the cultural and political impact of European conquest upon colonised societies, and the nature of those societies’ responses. The ‘post’ in the term refers to ‘after colonialism began’ rather than ‘after colonialism ended’ because the cultural struggles between imperial and dominated societies continue into the present. Post-colonial theory is concerned with a range of cultural engagements: the impact of imperial languages upon colonised societies; the effects of European ‘master-discourses’ such as history and philosophy; the nature and consequences of colonial education and the links between Western knowledge and colonial power. In particular, it is concerned with the responses of the colonised: the struggle to control self-representation, through the appropriation of dominant languages, discourses, and forms of narrative; the struggle over representations of place, history, race and ethnicity; and the struggle to present a local reality to a global audience. Although it has been heavily oriented towards literary theory, since it was prompted by the flourishing of literatures written by colonised peoples in colonial languages (particularly English), it is becoming widely used in historical, political, and sociological analyses as its relevance to these disciplines grows.

The issues which stand out in Said’s writing and which distinguish his critical identity from the colonial discourse theorists are: his concept of secular criticism, by which he means a criticism freed from the restrictions of intellectual specialisation; his advocacy of what he called amateurism in intellectual life; a need for the intellectual’s actual or metaphoric exile from ‘home’; and his passionate view of the need for intellectual work to recover its connections with the political realities of the society in which it occurs. This connection with political realities enables the intellectual to ‘speak truth to power’. It is the relationship of criticism to the world which underlies Said’s exposure of the way in which the ‘Orient’ has emerged as a discursive construction, and how contemporary ‘Islam’ continues to evolve as an alien construction of the West, indeed of the way the West continually constructs its others.

For Said, the problem with contemporary criticism was its extreme functionalism, which pays too much attention to the text’s formal operations but far too little to its materiality. The result of this is that the text becomes ‘a kind of self-consuming artifact; idealized, essentialized, instead of remaining the special kind of cultural object it is with a causation, persistence, durability and social presence quite its own’ (Said 1983: 148). The materiality of the text refers to various things: the ways, for example, in which the text is a monument, a cultural object sought after, fought over, possessed, rejected, or achieved in time. The text’s materiality also includes the range of its authority.

This question of worldliness, of the writer’s own position in the world, gets to the heart of another paradox central to this consideration of Edward Said’s work – how do we read texts? For any text, Said’s included, is constructed out of many available discourses, discourses within which writers themselves may be seen as subjects ‘in process’, and which they may not have had in mind when they put pen to paper. Worldliness begins by asking one of the most contentious questions in politically oriented theory: who addresses us in the text? And this is a question we must ask of Edward Said’s work. We may grant that the ‘author’ in the text is a textual construction without therefore assuming that nobody speaks to us in the text, which may be the tendency in much contemporary theory. Ultimately, worldliness is concerned with the materiality of the text’s origin, for this material being is embedded in the very materiality of the matters of which it speaks: dispossession, injustice, marginality, subjection.

THE WORLDLINESS OF THE TEXT

To understand the significance of Said’s theory of worldliness, we need to go back to the structuralist revolution in contemporary theory in the 1950s and 1960s. Before this time critics had more or less assumed that books were simple communications from writers to readers. The French structuralist theorist Roland Barthes, building on developments in linguistics, used the concept of ‘text’ to explain how literary works actually come into being. The term ‘text’ is related to ‘texture’ or ‘textile’. According to Barthes, written texts, from a simple sentence to more complex texts, were woven from a horizontal thread – the linear arrangement of words in a sentence, which he called the ‘syntagmatic’ axis – and a vertical thread – the range of possible words that could be used in that arrangement, which he called the ‘paradigmatic’ axis. For instance, each word in the syntagm ‘The cat sat on the mat’ could be replaced with other words from the paradigm to produce ‘The dog ran on the grass’ – a structurally similar sentence with a very different meaning.

Simple as this seems, it would be hard to over-emphasise the impact structuralism had upon literary analysis. When this principle was applied to more complex texts, a structuralist analysis could detect in the text a combination of elements which may not have occurred to the author, and, indeed, which could dispense with the author. Far from being simple communications from authors, texts were seen to be structures constructed from the various elements available from their social and cultural ‘paradigm’. Meaning could be seen to be the result of an interplay of relationships of selection and combination made possible by the underlying structure. For instance, the ‘character of Brutus’ is a consequence of the relationships established in the structure rather than the representation of something out there in the world. This had a radical effect on the perception of Authorship. Rather than a creative genius who puts the meaning into the text, a subject who is the final arbiter of meaning in the text, Barthes posits that the Author is itself a function of language. Although pure structuralist analysis had a relatively short period of popularity, the concept of the text it initiated has continued to affect all forms of contemporary theory.

Post-structuralism differed from structuralism in that while it accepted the constructedness of texts it denied that a structure could arrive at a final meaning. Roland Barthes himself altered his earlier structuralist position, and Jacques Derrida, in a celebrated talk in 1969, ‘Structure, sign and play in the human sciences’ (Macksey and Donato 1970), claimed that the problem with a structure is that it has an organising principle, or centre, and it is precisely the fixity of this organising principle which post-structuralism rejects. To post-structuralism, the centre, the clear organising principle by which meaning can be determined, does not exist because we can never reach a final meaning.

To understand the difference between post-structuralism and structuralism, we must go back to the building blocks of linguistic theory. Barthes’ structuralism was based on the structuralist linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure, whose students had published his lecture notes in 1916 under the title Cours de linguistique générale. Saussure proposed the radical idea that words do not stand for things in the world, but, along with all signs, obtained their meaning by their difference from other signs. A word like ‘bat’, for instance, could stand for many things, but we understand its meaning by its difference from other signs in the sentence. Signs were made up of two elements, the sound image or signifier and the concept or mental image, known as the signified. For Saussure, this relationship was arbitrary: in other words, there is no natural or inevitable link between a particular signifier, say, a word in English, and the concept it signifies. But, although arbitrary, he held that this relationship was stable. The signifier and signified were always connected in the sign. This was the essence of the structure of language.

It is precisely here that post-structuralism parted company from structuralism, for, on the contrary, it posited that every signified could, in fact, also be seen to be a signifier. Meaning was deferred along an almost endless chain of signifiers. We can see an analogy of this in the dictionary definition of a word, which must use other words in its explanation, words which themselves might need explanation. Texts could be ‘deconstructed’ to show that, far from being simple structures, they constantly contradicted their underlying assumptions. Ultimately, although different from structuralism, in its rejection of a text’s organising principle, or centre, post-structuralism also proposed that there was no difference between the world and the text, that ‘the world’ was textually constructed.

We can probably date the popularity of post-structuralism in the English-speaking world from the late 1960s, and Edward Said himself was one of the first to interpret this new theory to the American public. But for anyone interested in the political impact of writing, such a theory presents problems. We only have to look at the complex worldliness of Said’s own writings to see how unsatisfactory this idea of textuality and of endlessly deferred meaning can be. Said’s dissatisfaction with terms such as ‘text’ can be seen when he reiterates Foucault’s question ‘at what point does an author’s text begin and where does it end; is a postcard or a laundry list written by Nietzsche a sequence within his integral text or not?’ (Said 1983: 130). While Said agrees that we should resist the assumption that the text is limited to the book, he goes further to say that to treat literature as an inert structure is to miss the important fact that it is an act located in the world. To treat the text as merely a structure of the paradigmatic and syntagmatic, say, is to divorce the text, which is a cultural production, a cultural act, from the relations of power within which it is produced. Such a tendency renders inert that compelling desire, the desire to write, ‘that is ceaseless, varied, and highly unnatural and abstract, since “to write” is a function never exhausted by the completion of a piece of writing’ (ibid.: 131).

A poignant anecdote from Said’s schooldays at Mount Hermon neatly demonstrates the difference between a tightly structured approach to the text and its ‘worldliness’. Given the essay topic ‘On lighting a match’, the studious Said duly looked up encyclopaedias, histories of industry, chemical manuals in a vain attempt to find the authorised, ‘correct’ answer. Asked by the teacher, ‘But is that the most interesting way to examine what happens when someone lights a match?’ Said exclaims that for the first time his formerly repressed critical and imaginative faculties were awakened (Said 1999: 230). The difference between the scientific description of this incendiary implement and the apprehension of what experiences might surround the striking of a match is a lot like the difference between ‘theological’ or theoretically doctrinaire views of the text, and the perception of the text as an act of writing.

When we locate this act of writing in the world, our notion of a text not only extends beyond its objective location in the book, it extends beyond the material presence of the script. Writing is the complex and generally orderly translation of many different forces into decipherable script, forces which all converge on the desire to write rather than to speak, to dance, to sculpt (ibid.: 129).The failure to take this into account in literary criticism is not simply a problem for structuralist analyses of the text. In some respects much professional literary criticism has reduced the text to an object and in so doing obscures both the text’s and the critic’s real relations with power. It is the exposure of the link between academic textual practice and such relations of power which underlies Said’s critique of Orientalist discourse.

Clearly, in societies with no tradition of literary writing, the desire to write can become a highly charged and highly mediated political act, sometimes issuing out of a very conscious tension. Why one form of writing and not another? Why at that moment and not another? Why literary writing anyway? But in any case, there are sequences, constellations, complexes of rational choices made by (or for) the writer for which the evidence is a printed text (Said 1983: 129). Writing is not some sort of second order representation of an experience which is already there, but it may be produced for something formed in the writing itself. The real force of Said’s theory of worldliness is that he takes on board Saussure’s view of the meaning of the sign residing in its difference from other signs, and the structuralist rejection of a simple relationship between the text and the world. But nevertheless, he insists on the fundamentally political importance of that world from which both the text and the critic originate, even if our only access to that world is formed in the writing itself.

One of the starting points Said takes for considering the worldliness of the text is a record released by the mercurial Canadian pianist Glenn Gould, including an interview in which he explained his reasons for abandoning live performances. Gould’s strategy seemed almost parodic of the complexity of the relationship between the world and the textual object.

Here was a pianist who had once represented the ascetic performer in the service of music, transformed now into unashamed virtuoso, supposedly little better than a musical whore, and this from a man who markets his record as a first and attaches to the attention-getting immediacy of a live interview.

(ibid.: 31)

Gould’s record, a text of a particular kind, indicated the ways in which texts manage to confirm their link with the world, and resist what post-structuralists would claim to be the endless deferral of signification.

A number of things link the musical and written texts, but principally they share a reproducible material existence on the one hand and a demonstration of the producer’s style on the other. A text, in its actually being a text, is a being in the world (ibid.: 33). That is, it has a material presence, a cultural and social history, a political and even an economic being, as well as a range of implicit connections to other texts. Any simple diametrical opposition asserted on the one hand between speech, bound by situation and reference, and on the other hand the text as an interception or suspension of speech’s worldliness, is misleading. Thus, Said takes French phenomenologist Paul Ricoeur (b. 1913) to task in the latter’s essay ‘What is a text: explanation and interpretation’, in which he claims that:

Language … and in general all the ostensive indicators of language serve to anchor discourse in the circumstantial reality which surrounds the instance of discourse. Thus, in living speech, the ideal meaning of what one says bends towards a real reference, namely to that ‘about which’ one speaks …

This is no longer the case when a text takes the place of speech … in the sense that it is postponed, a text is somehow ‘in the air’, outside of the world or without a world.

(cited in Said 1983: 34)

Ricoeur assumes, without sufficient argument, that circumstantial reality is exclusively the property of speech. But the simple fact is that texts have ways of existing which even in their most rarefied form are always enmeshed in circumstance, time, place and society: ‘in short, they are in the world, and hence worldly’ (ibid.: 35). Similarly, critics are not the simple translators of texts into circumstantial reality. The reproduction of textuality in criticism is itself bound up in circumstance, in ‘worldliness’. Indeed, for both post-colonial writer and critic, this worldliness is a crucial factor, for the manner and target of its address, its oppositionality, its revelatory powers of representation, its liminality, are fundamental features of its being in the world.

Like Derrida, Said disputes the...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE
• WHY SAID?
• KEY IDEAS
• AFTER SAID
• FURTHER READING
• WORKS CITED