Richard L. W.

Clarke LITS3304 Notes 12B

EDWARD SAID SECULAR CRITICISM (1983) Said, Edward. Secular Criticism. Critical Theory Since 1965. Ed. Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle. Tallahassee: UP of Florida, 1986. 605-622. Said begins this introduction to his celebrated collection of essays entitled The World, the Text and the Critic by identifying four major forms of literary criticism (606) currently practised in North American academia: book reviewing and literary journalism (605), academic literary history (605) which is descended from classical scholarship, philology and cultural history (605), literary appreciation and interpretation (605), and most recently literary theory (605) which, apart from the work of Kenneth Burke and the New Critics, largely originated in Europe and came to the fore in the 1970s. Each of these represent . . . specialisation . . . and a very precise division of intellectual labour (605). The assumption is that literature and the humanities exist generally within the culture (our culture, as it is generally known), that the culture is ennobled and validated by them (605) and that the approved practice of high culture is marginal to the serious political concerns of the society (605). Alluding to Julien Bendas trahison des clercs, that is, the view that expertise has usually been a service rendered, and sold, to the central authority of society (605), Said contends that the expertise of literary critics is noninterference (606) in the historical and social world (605) which they inhabit. In short, the cultural realm and its expertise are institutionally divorced from their real connections with power (605). Said argues that humanists and intellectuals accept the idea that you can read classy fiction as well as kill and maim because the cultural world is available for that particular sort of camouflaging, and because cultural types are not supposed to interfere in matters for which the social system has not prepared them (606). Said argues that literary theorys origins in Europe were, largely speaking, an insurrectionary (606) response to the traditional university, the hegemony of determinism and positivism, the reification of ideological bourgeois humanism, the rigid barriers between academic specialities (606). Theory viewed itself as something of a synthesis overriding the petty fiefdoms within the world of intellectual production (606). From being a bold interventionary movement (606), Said believes, American manifestations of Theory have retreated into the labyrinth of textuality (606). Theory, he argues, shuns anything that is worldly, circumstantial, or socially contaminated (606). Textuality is the somewhat mystical and disinfected subject matter of literary theory (606). Textuality has become the exact antithesis and displacement of what might be called history (606); it is not thought to take place anytime or anywhere in particular. It is produced, but by no one and at no time (606). He argues that reading and interpreting are routinely understood to occur in the form of misreading and misinterpreting (606). In short, literary theory, as practised in North America, has isolated textuality from the circumstances, the events, the physical senses that made it possible and render it intelligible as the result of human work (606). He accepts Hayden Whites view that there is no way to get past texts in order to apprehend real history directly (606), but he is of the view that this need not eliminate interest in events and the circumstances entailed by and expressed in the texts themselves (607). Saids position is that texts are worldly, to some degree they are events, and, even when they appear to deny it, they are nevertheless part of the social world, human life, and of course the historical moments in which they are located and interpreted. (607) Literary theory, whether of the Left or Right, has turned its back on these things (607), something attributable, in his opinion, to the triumph of the ethic of professionalism (607). It is not accidental, he thinks, that a philosophy of pure textuality (607) has coincided with

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the ascendancy of Reaganism (607). In having given up the world entirely for the aporias and unthinkable aporias of a text, contemporary criticism has retreated from its constituency, the citizens of modern society, who have been left to the hands of free market forces, multinational corporations, the manipulations of consumer appetites (607). A precious jargon has grown up, and its formidable complexities obscure the social realities (607) which, paradoxically, encourage this language of obfuscation. It is not practising criticism either to validate the status quo or to join up with a priestly cast of acolytes and dogmatic metaphysicians (607). Each essay in the collection, he insists, affirms the connection between texts and the existential actualities of human life, politics, societies, and events. The realities of power and authority as well as the resistances offered by men, women, and social movements to institutions, authorities and orthodoxies are the realities that make texts possible, that deliver them to their readers, that solicit the attention to critics. I propose that these realities are what should be taken account of by criticism and the critical consciousness. (607) This sort of criticism can only be practised outside and beyond the consensus ruling the art (607) of criticism today. Alluding to Matthew Arnold and, later T. S. Eliot, Said avers that it is the function of criticism at the present time (607) to find itself between the dominant culture and the totalising forms of critical systems (607). This situation which Said describes is nothing new, he contends. He is thinking here of Erich Auerbach who wrote his celebrated Mimesis: the Representation of Reality in Western Literature when in exile (608) as a Jew from Nazi Germany in Istanbul. A scholar in the old tradition of German Romance scholarship (608), stripped of all the scholarly resources to which he was accustomed (the loss of texts, traditions, continuities that make up the very web of culture [608] as well as libraries, research institutes, other books and scholars [608]), he saw himself as performing an act of cultural, even civilisational, survival of the highest importance (608). Moreover, Auerbachs location while writing his masterpiece is not without significance to Said in that Turkey represents the terrible Turk, as well as Islam, the scourge of Christendom, the great Oriental apostasy incarnate (608). The Orient and Islam stood for the ultimate alienation from and opposition to Europe, the European tradition of Christian Latinity, as well as to the putative authority of ecclesia, humanistic learning, and cultural community (608). Turkey, in short, embodied a monster, seeming to threaten Europe with destruction (608). Said points out that it was Auerbachs contention that it was precisely exile from home which made possible the superb undertaking of Mimesis (608). The answer to how an obstacle was converted into something positively creative is provided in Auerbachs essay The Philology of World Literature which is devoted to the idea that philological work deals with humanity at large and transcends national boundaries (608). However, the priceless and indispensable part of a philologists heritage is still his own nations culture and heritage (608) which one only realises when one is separated from it. All in all, Mimesis owes its very existence to Oriental, non-Occidental exile, and homelessness (609). From this point of view, Mimesis is not only a massive reaffirmation of the Western cultural tradition, but also a work built upon a critically important alienation from it (609). In other words, its insights into European culture are based on an agonising distance form it (609). Said turns his attention at this point to the notion of place (609), which is most often defined in terms of a nation (609): in the exaggerated boundary drawn between Europe and the Orient . . . the idea of a nation, of a national-cultural community as a sovereign entity and place set against other places, has its fullest realisation (609). Terms like at home or in place suggest certain nuances, principally of reassurance, fitness, belonging, association, and

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community (609). Said says that he uses the term culture to suggest an environment, process and hegemony in which individuals (in their private circumstances) and their works are embedded, as well as overseen at the top by a superstructure and at the base by a whole series of methodological attitudes. It is in culture that we can seek out the range of meanings and ideas conveyed by the phrases belonging to or in a place, being at home in a place. (609) Culture, for Said, is not merely something to which one belongs but something one possesses, and along with that proprietary process, culture also designates a boundary by which the concepts of what is extrinsic or intrinsic to the culture come into forceful play (609). Said is particularly interested in the power of by virtue of its elevated position to authorise, to dominate, to legitimate, demote, interdict, and validate: in short, the power of culture to be an agent of . . . powerful differentiation within its domain and beyond it too (609). This is far more important that the grid of research techniques and ethics by which the prevailing culture imposes on the individual scholar its canons of how literary scholarship is to be conducted (610). Far more important in Saids view is culture qua a system of values saturating downward almost everything within its purview (610) and the canons and standards (610) of which are invisible to the degree that they are natural, objective and real (610). Culture has always involved hierarchies (610), separating the elite from the popular, the best from the less than best (610), etc. Its tendency has always been to move downwards from the height of power and privilege in order to diffuse, disseminate, and and expand itself in the widest possible range (610). This is the sense intended by Matthew Arnold when he argues that society is the actual, material base over which culture tries, through the great men of culture, to extend its sway. The optimum relationship between culture and society is correspondence, the former covering the latter (610). Moreover, this ambition of culture to reign over society (610) is essentially combative (610), resulting in the assertively achieved and won hegemony of an identifiable set of ideas (610). It is no accident that Arnold resolutely identifies a triumphant culture with the State, insofar as culture is mans best self, and the State its realisation in material reality (610). This is why Arnold identifies disruptive activities such as strikes and demonstrations as anarchic threats to the State, leading to the equation in Arnolds mind between culture, the sustained suzerainty of culture over society (anything precious and lasting), and the framework and quasi-theological exterior order of the State (611). Tied in with all this is the entire matrix of meanings we associate with home, belonging and community (611). Outside this range of meanings . . . stand anarchy, the culturally disenfranchised, those elements opposed to culture and the State: the homeless, in short (611). For Arnold, culture is defined, in short, both negatively and positively; it is a system of discriminations and evaluations (611), a system of exclusions legislated from above but enacted throughout its polity, by which such things as anarchy, disorder, irrationality, inferiority, bad taste, and immorality are identified, then deposited outside the culture and kept there by the power of the State and its institutions. For if it is true that culture is, on the one hand, a positive doctrine of the best that is thought and known, it is also on the other a differentially negative doctrine of all that is not best. (611) Said cites the work of Foucaults view of culture as an institutionalised process by which what is considered appropriate is appropriate (611): Foucault focuses, to be precise, on how certain alterities, certain Others have been kept silent, outside or in the case of penal discipline and sexual repression domesticated for use inside the culture (611). Notwithstanding certain quibbles about some aspects of Foucaults project, Said embraces his basic contention, to wit, that the

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dialectic of self-fortification and self-confirmation by which culture achieves its hegemony over society and the State is based on a constantly practised differentiation of self from what it believes to be not itself. And this differentiation is frequently performed by setting the valorized culture over the Other. (611) Culture, Said contends, often has to do with an aggressive sense of nation, home, community, and belonging (611). This is borne out by Macaulays 1935 Minute on Indian Education which includes the claim that a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia. . . . In every branch of physical or moral philosophy, the relative position of the two nations is the same (611-612). Said argues that Macaulays was an ethnocentric opinion with ascertainable results. He was speaking from a position of power where he could translate his opinions into the decision to make an entire subcontinent of natives submit to studying in a language not their own (612). Said contends that superiority and power are lodged in a rhetoric of belonging, or being at home, so to speak, and in a rhetoric of administration (612). Even John Stuart Mills, whose views on liberty and representative government have for generations passed as the advanced liberal culture statement on such matters (611), believed that these did not really apply to India (612) because in his cultures judgment, Indias civilisation has not attained the requisite degree of development (612). Arguing that such exclusionary acts may be something to which even a great thinker like Marx himself was not immune, Saids focus is on the ethnocentric and often racist history of European culture, especially during and since the heyday of imperialism in the nineteenth century: the entire history of nineteenth century European thought is filled with such discriminations as these, made between what is fitting for us and what is fitting for them, the former designated as inside, in place, common, belonging, in a word above, the latter who are designated as outside, excluded, aberrant, inferior, in a word below. . . . The large cultural-national designation of European culture as the privileged norm carried with it a formidable battery of other distinctions between ours and theirs, between proper and improper, European and non-European, higher and lower: they are to be found everywhere in such subjects and quasi-subjects as linguistics, history, race theory, philosophy, anthropology, and even biology. (612) Said is of the view that in the transmission and persistence of a culture there is a continual process of reinforcement, by which the hegemonic culture will add to itself the prerogatives given it by its sense of national identity, its power as an implement, ally or branch of the state, its rightness, its exterior forms and assertions of itself: and most important, by its vindicated power as a victor over everything not itself. (612) Said is of the view that all cultures operate in this way . . . in enforcing their hegemony (613). Said at this point turns his attention to the resistance (613) which such police activities (613) necessarily spawn. Such resistance often takes the form of outright hostility (613) and emanates from individuals declared out of bounds or inferior by the culture (613), ranging from the ritual scapegoat to the lonely prophet, from the social pariah to the visionary artist, from the working class to the alienated intellectual (613). Said agrees with Benda, though, that it is often the intellectual, the clerc, who has stood for values, ideas and activities that transcend and deliberately interfere with the collective weight imposed by the nation-state and the national culture (613). He has in mind, in this respect, Socrates,

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Voltaire and, in particular, Gramscis notion of the organic intellectual allied with an emergent class against ruling-class hegemony (613). Warning that one should not, like Benda, ascribe so much social power the solitary intellectual whose authority . . . comes from his individual voice and from his opposition to organised collective passions (613), Said contends that just as racist and other odious sentiments have functioned to coarsen and brutalise the individual (613), then it is probably true that an isolated individual consciousness, going against the surrounding environment as well as allied to contesting classes, movements, and values, is an isolated voice out of place but very much of that place, standing consciously against the prevailing orthodoxy and very much for a professedly humane or universal set of values, which has provided significant local resistance to the hegemony of one culture. (613) Of course, he points out, it is also true that intellectuals are often eminently useful in making hegemony work (613), hence the trahison des clercs of which Benda speaks. Said argues that the individual consciousness (613) is located at what he characterises as a sensitive nodal point (613): it is this consciousness at that critical point which this book attempts to explore in the form of what I call criticism (613). On the one hand, the individual mind registers and and is very much aware of the collective whole, context, or situation in which it finds itself (613). On the other hand, precisely because of this awareness a worldly self-situating, a sensitive sensitive response to the dominant culture (613), this individual consciousness is not naturally and easily a mere child of the culture, but a historical and social actor in it (613). Because of that perspective, which introduces circumstance and distinction where there had only been conformity and belonging, there is distance or what we might also call criticism (613): a knowledge of history, a recognition of the importance of social circumstance, an analytical capacity for making distinctions: these trouble the quasi-religious authority of being comfortably at home . . . among ones own people, supported by known powers and acceptable values, protected against the outside world. (613-614) Nevertheless, the critics relationship to his/her particular socio-historical context, while oppositional, is all the same undeniable: critical consciousness is a part of its actual social world and of the literal body that it inhabits, not by any means an escape from the one or the other (614). Erich Auerbach, for example, though an exile from Europe, is very much steeped in the reality of Europe (614). There is evident in his case both filiation with his natal culture (614) and affiliation with it through critical consciousness and scholarly work (614). This cooperation between filiation and affiliation (614), between the critics relationship to his culture and to a particular theoretical system, is located at the heart of critical consciousness (614). Relationships of filation and affiliation are plentiful in modern cultural history (614), Said suggests. It is not accidental, for example, that [c]hildless couples, orphaned children, aborted childbirths, and unregenerately celibate men and women populate the world of high modernism with remarkable insistence, all of them suggesting the difficulties of filiation (614). This the failure of the capacity to produce or generate children (614) is as true of the work of Joyce or Eliot or Conrad as it is of Freud or Lukacs (though the work of the latter belongs intellectually and politically to another universe of discourse [614]). However, the period is also marked by the opposing pressure to produce new and different ways of conceiving human relationships (614). If biological reproduction is either too difficult or too unpleasant, is there some other way by which men and women can create social bonds between each another that would substitute for those ties that connect members of the same family across generations? (614). For writers like Eliot, the aridity, wastefulness and

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sterility of modern life make filiation (614) and undesirable alternative. In its place, Eliot suggests institutions, associations and communities whose social existence was not in fact guaranteed by biology, but by affiliation (614). What Said terms genealogical descent (615) is replaced by horizontal affiliation (615), the bonds of blood by an affiliative corporation . . . which commands the respect and the attention of its adherents (615). For Lukacs, similarly, only class consciousness . . . could possibly break through the antinomies and atomisations of reified existence in the modern capitalist world order (615-616). What Said is trying to describe is the transition from the failed idea or possibility of filiation to a kind of compensatory order that, whether it is a party, an institution, a culture, a set of beliefs, or even a world-vision, provides men and women with a new form of relationship, which I have been calling affiliation but which is also a new system (616). The goal in so doing is to reinstate vestiges of that kind of authority associated in the past with filiative order (616). The new community is greater than the individual adherent or member, just as the father is greater by virtue of seniority than the sons and daughters (616). In other words, the ideas, the values, and the systematic totalising world-view validated by the new order are all bearers of authority too, with the result that something resembling a cultural system is established (616). If a filial relationship is held together by natural bonds and natural forms of authority involving obedience, fear, love, respect and instinctual conflict the new affiliative relationship changes these bonds into what seem to be transpersonal forms such as guild consciousness, consensus, collegiality, professional respect, class and the hegemony of a dominant culture. (616). Where filiation belongs to the realm of nature (616), affiliation belongs to that of culture and society (616). This transition is also apparent corresponding developments in the structure of knowledge (616). The increased dependence of the modern scholar upon the small, specialised guild of people in his or her field (as indeed the very idea of a field itself), and the notion within fields that the originating subject is of less importance than transhuman rules and theories, accompany the transformation of naturally filiative into systematic affilative relationships (616). The loss of the subject . . . is in various ways the loss as well of the procreative, generative urge authorising filiative relationships (616). All in all, the foregoing goes to show that affiliation can easily become a system of thought no less orthodox and dominant than culture itself (616). At this point, Said suddenly turns his attention to the effects of this pattern (616) on the study of literature today (616). The structure of literary knowledge . . . is heavily imprinted (616) with this three-part pattern (616). Since Eliot, Richards and Leavis, the assumption has been that it is the duty of humanistic scholars in our culture to devote themselves to the study of the great monuments of literature (616). This sentiment is passed on to younger generations with the result that they become members, by affiliation and formation, of the company of educated individuals (616). The university has consecrated the pact between a canon of works, a band of initiate instructors, a group of younger affiliates (616). All this reproduces the filiative discipline supposedly transcended by the educational process (616). Said is of the view, however, that for the first time in history the whole imposing edifice of humanistic knowledge resting on the classics of European letters . . . represents only a fraction of the real human relationships and interactions now taking place in the world (617). Auerbach was among the last to think that European culture could be viewed coherently and importantly as unquestionably central to human history (617). New cultures, new societies, and emerging visions of social, political, and aesthetic order now lay claim to the humanists attention (617). But what our students are instead taught is that classic texts embody, express, represent what is best in our, that is, the only tradition (617). Moreover, they are taught that such fields as the humanities and such subfields as literature exist in a relatively neutral political element, that they are to be appreciated and

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venerated, that they define the limits of what is acceptable, appropriate and legitimate so far as culture is concerned (617). The affiliative order so presented surreptitiously duplicated the closed and tightly knit family structure that secures generational hierarchical relations to one another (617). Affiliation becomes a literal form of re-presentation, by which what is ours is good, and therefore deserves incorporation and inclusion in our programmes of humanistic study, and what is not ours in this ultimately provincial sense is simply left out (617). Out of this representation emerges systematic theories, ranging from that of Northrop Frye to Foucaults, which claim the power to show how things work, once and for all, totally and predictively (617). Clearly, Said argues, the new affiliative order merely reinforces the skeleton of family authority supposedly left behind (617) in that the great texts, as well as the great teachers and the great theories, have an authority that compels respectful attention not so much by virtue of their content but because they are either old or they have power, they have been handed on in time or seem to have no time, and they have traditionally been revered (617). Said admits that he has himself often be rightly accused of conservative attitudes (617) in his exploration of the canon or his interest in theorists like Auerbach. What Said takes exception to, he argues, is the almost unconsciously held ideological assumption that the Eurocentric model for the humanities . . . represents a natural and proper subject matter for the humanistic scholar (617). In point of fact, however, its authority comes not only from the orthodox canon of literary monuments handed down through the generations, but also from the way this continuity reproduces the filial continuation of the chain of biological procreation. What we have then is the substitution of one sort of order for another, in the process of which everything that is nonhumanistic and nonliterary and non-European is deposited outside the structure. (617) Most of our most cherished assumptions about the humanities, Said argues, are ostrich-like and retrograde (617). Given that most of the world today is non-European (617) and most transactions within the world information order (617) are not literary (617), the process of representation, by which filiation is reproduced in the affiliative structure and made to stand for what belongs to us (as we in turn belong to the family of our languages and our traditions), reinforces the known at the expense of the unknown (617). The second assumption to which Said takes exception is the view that the principal relationships in the study of literature those I have identified as based on representation ought to obliterate the traces of other relationships within literary structures that are based principally on acquisition and appropriation (617-618). Said is impressed by Raymond Williamss approach in The Country and the City where, in discussing seventeenth century country-house poems, he does not concentrate on what those poems represent, but on what they are as a result of contested social and political relationships (618). What Williams underlines for the modern reader of these poems is what has in fact been excluded from the poems, the labour that created the mansions, the social processes of which they are the culmination, the dispossessions and theft they actually signified (618). His book is a remarkable attempt at a dislodgement of the very ethos of system, which has reified relationships and stripped them of their social density (618). He has tried to insert in its place the great dialectic of acquisition and representation, by which even realism . . . has gained its durable status as a result of contests involving money and power (618). In short, what (Marxist) critics like Williams teach us is to read in a different way and to remember that for every poem or novel in the canon there is a social fact being requisitioned for the page, a human life engaged, a class suppressed or elevated none of which can be accounted for in the framework rigidly maintained by the processes of representation and affiliation doing above-ground work for the conservation of filiation (618). Said warns that for every critical system grinding on there are events, heterogeneous and unorthodox social configurations,

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human beings and texts disputing the possibility of a sovereign methodology of system (618). Said points out that everything said thus far is an extrapolation from the verbal echo we hear between the words filiation and affiliation (618). Affiliation, he argues, given birth to by filiation, becomes a form of representing the filiative processes to be found in nature, although affiliation takes validated nonbiological social and cultural forms (618). The critic is faced with two possible responses: firstly, organic complicity (618) whereby the critic enables, indeed transacts, the transfer of legitimacy from filiation to affiliation; literally a midwife, the critic encourages reverence for the humanities and for the dominant culture served by the humanities (618). This keeps relationships within the narrow circle of what is natural, appropriate and valid for us, and thereafter excludes the non-literary, the nonEuropean, and above all the political dimension in which all literature, all texts, can be found (618). It also gives rise to a critical system or theory . . . that . . . resolves all the problems that culture gives rise to (618). For Said, critics should not bind themselves to one particular methodology the adoption of a particular theoretical perspective should be self-conscious but provisional. The alternative is for the critic to recognise the difference between instinctual filiation and social affiliation, and to show how affiliation sometimes reproduces filiation, sometimes makes its own forms (618). In this way, most of the political and social world becomes available for critical and secular scrutiny (618) and viewable as a composite social and historical enterprise, made and remade unceasingly by men and women in society (618). Such a secular critical consciousness (618) may also examine those forms of writing affiliated with literature as a result of the ideological capture of literary text within the humanistic curriculum as it now stands (618) and reveal how critical systems even of the most sophisticated kind can succumb to the inherently representative and reproductive relationship between a dominant culture and the domains it rules (618). Arguing that the intellectuals situation is a worldly one (618), Said contends that the major question addressed by this collection of essays is: What does it mean to have a critical consciousness if . . . the intellectuals social identity should involve something more than strengthening those aspects of the culture that require mere affirmation and orthodox compliancy from its members? (618-619). Critical consciousness stands between the temptations represented by two formidable and related powers engaging critical attention. One is the culture to which critics are bound filiatively (by birth, nationality, profession); the other is a method or system acquired affiliatively (by social and political conviction, economic and historical circumstances, voluntary effort and willed association). (619) For example, Vico and Swift were worldly writers . . . materially bound to their time (619) whose whole enterprise (619) was to resist (619) the pressures (619) which their era exerted on them culturally and systematically (619). Admitting that criticism is an academic thing (619), Said contends that it has become escapist for specialisation and professionalisation, allied with cultural dogma, barely sublimated ethnocentrism and nationalism, as well as surprisingly insistent quasi-religious quietism (619) have turned it into a relative untroubled and secluded world (619) with little or no contact with the world of events and societies (619). Contemporary criticism has become an institution for publicly affirming the values of our, that is, European, dominant elite society (619) and for setting loose the unrestrained interpretation of a universe defined in advance as the endless misreading of a misinterpretation (619). The result has been the regulated, not to say calculated, irrelevance of criticism, except as an adornment to what the powers of modern industrial society transact: the hegemony of militarism and a new cold war, the depoliticisation of the citizenry, the overall compliance of the intellectual class to which the critics belong (619). He laments the dangers of method and system (619) which, as

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they become sovereign and as their practitioners lose contact with the resistance and the heterogeneity of civil society, . . . risk becoming wall-to-wall discourses, blithely predetermining what they discuss, heedlessly converting everything into evidence for the efficacy of the method, carelessly ignoring the circumstances out of which all theory and system, and method derive (619). For this reason, criticism is always situated, skeptical, secular (619) and, as such, never value-free (619): the inevitable trajectory of critical consciousness is to arrive at some acute sense of what political, social, and human values are entailed in the reading, production of every text (619). To stand between culture [filiation] and system [affiliation] is therefore to stand close to . . . a concrete reality about which political, moral, and social judgments have to be made and, if not only made, then exposed and demystified (619). Said agrees with Stanley Fish that every act of interpretation is given force by an interpretive community (619) but we must seek to understand what historical and social configuration, what political interests are concretely entailed by the very existence of interpretive communities (619), especially when these communities have evolved camouflaging jargons (619). Said is of the view that the essays which comprise this collection all reflect his comments on criticism and critical consciousness (619). If secular criticism deals with local and worldly situations and . . . is constitutively opposed to the creation of massive hermetic systems (620), Said argues, then the essay a comparatively short, investigative, radically skeptic form is the principal way in which to write such criticism (620). The book evinces a unity of attitude and of concern (620): it presupposes (620) his earlier book Beginnings: Intention and Method (1975), which argued the practical and theoretical necessity of a reasoned point of departure for any intellectual and creative job of work (620), as well as three books on which he was working as these essays were being written: Orientalism (1978), The Question of Palestine (1979), and Covering Islam (1981), all books whose historical and social setting is political and cultural in the most urgent way (620). By focusing on the relationship between scholarship and politics, between a specific situation and the interpretation and the production of a text, between textuality itself and social reality (620), these essays constitute a sort of theoretical preamble to or, at least, explication of the books in question. Said says that the essays here are arranged in three interlinked ways (620). Firstly, he examines the worldly and secular world in which texts take place (620) and in which certain writers like Swift are exemplary for their attention to the detail of everyday existence defined as situation, event and the organisation of power (620). The challenge of the critic is that this secular world . . . is not reducible to an explanatory or originating theory, much less to a collection of cultural generalities (620). There are, instead, a small number of perhaps unexpected characteristics of worldliness that play a role in making sense of textual experience, among them filiation and affiliation, the body and the sense of sight and hearing, repetition and the sheer heterogeneity of detail. (620) Secondly, he addresses the peculiar problems (620) of contemporary theory as it either confronts or ignores issues raised for the study of texts (620) and, lastly, he treats the problem of what happens when the culture attempts to understand, dominate, or recapture another, less powerful one (620). Said admits that the essays which comprise this collection do not make absolutely clear what my critical position only implied by Orientalism and my other recent books really is (621). In terms of critical position (621), Said is of the view that the history of thought . . . is extravagantly illustrative of how the dictum solidarity before criticism means the end of criticism (621). Warning that even in the very midst of a battle in which one is

Richard L. W. Clarke LITS3304 Notes 12B

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unmistakably on one side against another, there should be criticism, because there must be critical consciousness if there are to be issues, problems, values, even lives to be fought for (621), he admits that he has been more influenced by Marxists than by Marxism or any other ism (621). He is of the view that Marxism is in need of systematic decoding, demystifying, rigorous clarification (621) at the hands of non-Marxist intellectuals (621) such as Noam Chomsky. The same is true of conservative (621) criticism such as that of Erich Auerbachs which also teaches us how to be critical, rather than how to be good members of a school (621). Said is of the view that criticism (621) must be oppositional (621) or ironic (621) in nature. It is reducible neither to a doctrine nor a political position on a particular question, and if it is to be in the world and self-aware simultaneously, then its identity is its difference from other cultural activities and from systems of thought or of method. In its suspicion of totalising concepts, in its discontent with reified objects, in its impatience with guilds, specialised interests, imperialised fiefdoms, and orthodox habits of mind, criticism is most itself, . . . and most unlike itself at the moment it starts turning into organised dogma. (621) Criticism, Said argues, must think of itself as life-enhancing and constitutively opposed to every form of tyranny, domination, and abuse. Its social goals are noncoercive knowledge, produced in the interests of human freedom (621). Alluding to Raymond Williams distinction between residual, dominant and emergent modes of knowledge, criticism belongs in that potential space inside civil society, acting on behalf of those alternative acts and alternative intentions whose advancement is a fundamental human and intellectual obligation (621).