The Critic as an Intellectual
James Jiang on Edward Said’s Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures
Though still largely remembered for having authored Orientalism (1978), Edward W. Said’s greatest legacy may be that he made the scholar-activist a more attractive and plausible cultural figure. Credit is usually (and correctly) laid at the feet of Michel Foucault for establishing the theoretical foundations of the idea that the production of knowledge is a way of exercising power. However, the political commitments Said put down in his writing and lived out in his career helped give this notion its wider currency.
The irony is that few among the core constituency of his readership—academics and students in the humanities—would now identify with the labels that meant most to him: ‘critic’ and ‘intellectual’. The whole lexico-semantic field for describing academic labour has changed: anyone with an inclination towards snooping into other people’s backyards has become an ‘interdisciplinary researcher’ or (if they have concocted an abstract enough alibi) a ‘theorist’. ‘Scholar’ itself is heard less and less as it yields to scientific-bureaucratic labels like ‘chief investigator’. As Said helped us understand, representations don’t just allow us to think a certain way; they also give us license to act in a particular fashion. To lose a self-image, then, is to forfeit a specific mode of inhabiting and engaging the world.
This isn’t to say that we ought not to be skeptical of the modes of habitation and engagement evoked by the category of ‘intellectual’. I once heard a Cambridge don remark that a ‘public intellectual’ was ‘a dumb person’s idea of a smart person’ (he had been talking about Stephen Fry). A more precise and forensic denigration is offered by the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu in respect of the ‘total intellectual’ modelled (in Bourdieu’s view) by Jean-Paul Sartre: having been consecrated by ‘a triumphant educational institution’ (the prestigious École normale supérieure), the ‘total intellectual’ occupied ‘a kind of universal magistrature of the intelligence’ and ‘armed with their intelligence alone[,] they scarcely encumbered themselves with any positive knowledge’. ① Terms such as ‘interdisciplinary researcher’, ‘theorist’, and ‘chief investigator’ at least have the merit of specifying and localizing their sources of authority. What does the word ‘intellectual’ name except a mystifyingly rarefied power of intellection?
When we keep these criticisms in mind, the idiosyncrasy of Said’s advocacy of the ‘intellectual’ becomes more apparent. For on the one hand, Said had an immense respect for ‘positive knowledge’, especially the near-encyclopaedic mastery of literary, historical, and archaeological archives exhibited by continental European philologists such as Erich Auerbach, Leo Spitzer, Ernest Renan, and Louis Massignon (even if such mastery was put to dubious use). You can also see it in Said’s frequent appeals to ‘fact’: orientalism is variously invoked as an ‘historical fact of domination’, ‘the gross political fact’, ‘the big dominating fact’, ‘a cultural and political fact’, and ‘an existential and … a moral fact’ in the relatively short span of the introduction to his great book. ② Said’s fluency in the niceties of textualist and poststructuralist analysis has tended to obscure how empirically-minded and materialist he could be (the subsequent emphasis on Orientalism’s Foucauldian elements has tended to obscure the decisive influence of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci on Said’s thinking).
On the other hand, few critics of his (and later) generation(s) were as committed to a generalist outlook as a matter of intellectual and political principle. ‘Generalism’ is not a term Said used very often (if at all), but it is implied by his insistence on ‘worldliness’—the way writing is tangled up in a thick web of intentional, social, and historical circumstance—and by his privileging of the ‘amateur’ against the specialized, functionalist, and invariably mercenary ‘professional’. For Said, to be an intellectual was ipso facto to be a generalist since it was only by transgressing the bounds of certified opinion that one could maintain independence from institutionalized consensus or orthodoxy. The intellectual was thus ‘worldly’ in one sense (in trying to provide a more inclusive picture of ‘the whole of live experience’ in C. Wright Mills’ phrase) ③, but at the same time poised against the ‘worldliness’ (one might say, the strategic entrepreneurialism) of professionals and their vendible expertise.
The paradox of the intellectual’s unworldly worldliness is brought out rather sharply in Said’s habitual returns to Julien Benda’s book, La Trahison des Clercs (1927), translated into English in 1928 by Richard Aldington with the title ‘The Treason of the Intellectuals’. ④ For Benda, it was precisely the universalism which Bourdieu would come to find so sophistic about Sartre that was being betrayed by intellectuals as they increasingly came under the sway of nationalism, positivism, and pragmatism. The contrast between Bourdieu’s juridical (‘magistrature’) and Benda’s religious (‘cleric’) metaphors is also telling: it was the moral legitimation that intellectuals gave to these new secular passions which seemed so troubling to Benda. Instead of curbing the ‘realist’ appetites of the ‘lay’ citizen and de-escalating the violence of partisanship, intellectuals such as Maurice Barrès and Charles Maurras fanned the flames of a French culture war that had erupted with the Dreyfus Affair. It was during the course of L’Affaire that the modern sense of ‘intellectual’—as denoting a recognizable class of educated élites with a coherent set of class interests—first came into being (‘les intellectuels’ was the term levelled at the supporters of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish artillery officer tried and convicted of passing military secrets to the Germans). ‘Our age’, Benda wrote ominously, ‘is the age of the intellectual organization of political hatreds’. ⑤
Said was often accused of being precisely that: an intellectual organizer of political hatreds. He remarks ruefully in the introduction to the publication of his 1993 Reith Lectures, Representations of the Intellectual: ‘there was a persistent, albeit relatively small chorus of criticism directed at [the BBC] for having invited me … I was accused of being active in the battle for Palestinian rights, and thus disqualified for any sober or respectable platform at all’. ⑥ Biography was always an important context for Said (he had, after all, written his doctoral thesis on Joseph Conrad’s letters) and one might read the Reith Lectures as Said’s Apologia pro vita sua—for ‘the art of representing’, as he dubbed the intellectual’s vocation, was an attempt to make ‘the private sensibility’ register at the level of public ‘decisions about war and freedom and justice’. ⑦ The Reith Lectures’ study in representations was thus a study in self-representation—an attempt to explain why his energetic activism on behalf of a specific cause in no way infringed upon his ability to espouse a set of general principles for intervening in civic life. And in Benda, Said had found a seemingly unlikely ally.
On the face of it, Benda and Said could not have seemed further apart; according to the former, the intellectual was an apostle of universal values, while for the latter, he or she was a secular spokesperson for the marginalized. And yet, as Said could see, even for Benda:
Real intellectuals are never more themselves than when, moved by metaphysical passion and disinterested principles of justice and truth, they denounce corruption, defend the weak, defy imperfect or oppressive authority. ⑧
Benda was not unaware, of course, that ‘clerks’ had historically intervened in worldly affairs, but they did so on the basis of ‘abstract justice’; they were fired by a commitment to ‘humanism’ (‘a sensitiveness to the abstract quality of what is human … a pure passion of the intelligence, implying no terrestrial love’) rather than ‘humanitarianism’ (‘the love of human beings existing in the concrete’). ⑨ The intervention of the ‘clerk’ had the primary integrity of an intellectual exercise, irrespective of the concrete, political results it entailed.
What Said no doubt found attractive in this image, even if it happened to be couched in an untenable idiom, was the oppositional energy that could be activated through the clerk’s transcendental detachment. As Benda noted rather wryly, ‘We may say beforehand that the “clerk” who is praised by the laymen is a traitor to his office’. ⑩ In Representations, Said attempts to reconstruct Benda’s argument on a more immanent basis and in so doing, to open up the category of the intellectual to more than the select few (proponents of ‘universal values’, like Benda, seldom assume these values actually to be universally distributed) and without blunting its polemical edge. By the time Said was giving the Reith Lectures, the sociological literature on intellectuals had grown substantially and the somewhat outdated citation of Benda was meant to reverse the current by which the intellectual ‘might become only another professional or a figure in a social trend’. ⑪
Said rarely speaks of the intellectual as a sociological entity or ‘modal type’; rather, the intellectual embodied for him a performative possibility, an ‘activity’ rather than a persona (so that the category could also encompass a figure such as the virtuosic pianist, Glenn Gould). For Said, this was perhaps easier to see in fiction than elsewhere and he draws upon the examples of Turgenev’s Bazarov, Flaubert’s Frédéric Moreau, and Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus in showing the sheer intractability of these young intellectuals’ critical consciousnesses, at once ‘skeptical, engaged, unremittingly devoted to rational investigation and moral judgment’. ⑫ Particularly in the cases of Bazarov and Dedalus, we are dealing with characters who resist the conventional framings of realist fiction; they refuse to be subdued by the sequentiality of plot or the authority of the narrator, either prematurely short-circuiting out of the story altogether or shakily usurping the rights of the storyteller. They are wantaways from what Henry James once called ‘the house of fiction’, groping desperately toward the ‘hinged doors opening straight upon life’.
Being an intellectual for Said was a distinctly ‘unhousèd’ activity; and for this reason, the intellectual was associated with the figures of the exile and the amateur. The prominence Said gave to the exilic intellectual was partially a reflection of history—the wars and mass displacements in the postwar period that were factors in his own story—but also symptomatic of a methodological will. What characterises the exile, both actual and metaphoric, is a ‘double perspective that never sees things in isolation’ so that ‘an idea or experience is always counterposed with another, [thereby] making them both appear in a sometimes new and unpredictable light’. ⑬ The discipline of ‘comparative literature’, on which Said had such a formative influence, was thus a discipline designed for and by exiles.
But there were important moral and political cognates to this literary venture typified by the audacity of its ‘counterpositions’, of trying to think rigorously and coherently about figures as disparate as Giambattista Vico, Jonathan Swift, Theodor Adorno, V.S. Naipaul and C.L.R. James together. This model of comparativism was Said’s version of universalism, and the habit of ‘never see[ing] things in isolation’ could be translated from the realm of literary mimesis to that of social praxis. For it was incumbent on the intellectual to ‘universalize the crisis [in their own context], to give greater human scope to what a particular race or nation suffered, to associate that experience with the sufferings of others’. ⑭
Amateurism was Said’s name for another—namely, institutional—kind of homelessness and I want to conclude on this point since it seems at once the most contextually specific and yet the part of Said’s arguments that resonates most with present discontents. The immediate target of Said’s ‘amateurist’ critique was the rise of regional or ‘area’ studies during the Cold War as the American foreign policy and national security apparatus increasingly drew on university-trained experts, particularly from the social sciences, in establishing global hegemony. Such experts not only provided the intellectual capital for US ‘counterinsurgency’ practices (including the notorious ‘Project Camelot’), but the disciplinary specificity of their expertise also allowed them to shut out the voices of uncertified dissidents such as Noam Chomsky, whom they could dismiss as a ‘mere’ linguist. The so-called ‘Overton window’—a policy term emerging around the same time as Said’s Reith lectures and denoting the range of mainstream positions that make up an ‘electable’ platform—was essentially framed by the architraves of academic specialization.
There is, then, a strategic starkness to Said’s contrasts between the ‘professional supplicant’ and the ‘unrewarded, amateurish conscience’ that occasionally borders on an anti-institutionalism that doesn’t quite tally with his temperament or career. ⑮ Yet the privileging of the ‘amateurish conscience’ is vulnerable to the very argument that Said makes about Benda, who ‘never suggests how it is that [the clerks] know the truth, or whether their blinding insights into eternal principles might, like those of Don Quixote, be little more than private fantasies’. ⑯ The line between fanaticism and principled doubt, conspiracy and critique has worn thinner than Said’s argument could have anticipated—at what point does the big pharma skeptic turn into the anti-vaxxer? When does an analysis of biopower enter the slipstream of Covid-denialism? The degree of partisanship on these questions has made it harder to be ‘amateurishly’ critical about, say, the political legitimacy of the expertise wielded by public health officialdom, without such criticism being taken as a tokenistic gesture of affiliation.
That there is a politics of expertise is something Said helped us never to forget. And yet he also repeatedly insisted that ‘culture works very effectively to make invisible and even “impossible” the actual affiliations that exist between the world of ideas and scholarship, on the one hand, and the world of brute politics, corporate and state power, and military force, on the other’. ⑰ Said would have appreciated the irony whereby, partially as a result of the success of his arguments, the humanities are now thought of as the most ‘political’ of the disciplines (they are argued over as if they were)—more so than, say, economics or political science—and yet, given where government grants and university budgetary cuts have fallen (and are likely to continue to fall), the humanistic disciplines couldn’t be further from the actual centres of political efficacy.
If something like ‘critical thinking’ is one rationale for the continued existence of the humanities, then academic humanists may need to stop regarding it as an instrument of and for specialization, and more openly embrace ‘general practice’. As Said emphatically insisted towards the end of his life, what makes the humanities truly humane was their ability to foster an awareness of connections between different areas of experience, beginning with the irreducibly particular and expanding outwards in ‘widening circles of pertinence’ on the model of interpreting a text. ⑱ Yet such a vision no longer cuts much ice with universities frostbitten by bureaucratic ‘rationalization’ and an entrepreneurial grants ‘culture’ entrenched in the parochialism of ‘national interest’ tests and the philistine worldliness of ‘impact’ assessments. It is high time for researchers to risk being intellectuals—before there are only amateurs and exiles left.
✷✷✷
Works Cited
✷ 1. Pierre Bourdieu, Political Interventions: Social Science and Political Action, translated by David Fernbach (London: Verso, 2008), 27.
✷ 2. Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin Classics, 2003), 1-28.
✷ 3. C. Wright Mills, Power, Politics, and People: The Collected Essays of C. Wright Mills, ed. Irving Horowitz (New York: Ballantine, 1963), 299. Quoted in Said, Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures (New York: Vintage, 1996), 21. Hereafter, Representations.
✷ 4. Julien Benda, The Treason of the Intellectuals, translated by Richard Aldington (New York: Norton, 1969).
✷ 5. Benda 27.
✷ 6. Representations x.
✷ 7. Representations 12.
✷ 8. Representations 6.
✷ 9. Benda 51, 80.
✷ 10. Benda 51.
✷ 11. Representations 11.
✷ 12. Representations 20.
✷ 13. Representations 60.
✷ 14. Representations 44.
✷ 15. Representations 83.
✷ 16. Representations 7.
✷ 17. Said, ‘Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies, and Community’, Critical Inquiry 9:1 (1982): 1-26; 2.
✷ 18. Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 80.
James Jiang is a writer, editor, and recovering academic based in Melbourne/Naarm. His work has appeared in a variety of venues in Australia (Australian Book Review, Sydney Review of Books, Cordite) and abroad (Cambridge Quarterly, Ploughshares, Modernism/modernity). He is currently Assistant Editor at Australian Book Review.
His Twitter handle is @sprezzafuror.