jan selby, edward w. said truth, justice.pdf

EDWARD W. SAID: TRUTH, JUSTICE

AND NATIONALISM

Jan Selby

University of Sussex, UK

................ Within post-colonial debates, Edward Said has tended to be viewed by critics and

admirers alike through a predominantly postmodern lens: as an (albeit

inconsistent) Foucauldian genealogist of the relations between western truths

and oriental subjugation, and as an opponent of cultural homogeneity and

advocate of hybridity and exile. This paper argues, by contrast, that Said was

above all a critical modernist committed to truth and justice; that despite his

opposition to pure identities he was not anti-nationalist; and that he was

remarkably consistent, both philosophically and politically, across a lengthy

period of at least twenty-five years. In his desire to ‘speak truth to power’ and in

his ethical universalism, Said had much deeper affinities, the paper argues, with

Noam Chomsky than with Michel Foucault. It was this critical modernism, I

argue, that underlay Said’s belief that nationalist movements could be of

progressive and liberatory potential, and that also underlay his critiques of

mainstream propaganda on the question of Palestine, as well as his ambivalent

positions on the utility of the two-state solution.

Foucault

Chomsky

nationalism

Palestine

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interventions Vol. 8(1) 40 / 55 (ISSN 1369-801X print/1469-929X online)

Said

EDWARD W. SAID: TRUTH, JUSTICE AND NATIONALISM

........................

Jan Selby

It has become almost commonplace to charge Edward Said and his work

with inconsistency, even hypocrisy. The list of objections that have been

made is long indeed. For not only did Said deploy Foucault alongside

Gramsci in Orientalism (1991) [1978]), and T. S. Eliot alongside Fanon in

Culture and Imperialism (1994a [1993]) / in a manner that elided their

intellectual as well as political differences. Not only did Said juxtapose

searing denunciations of the racism inherent within ‘western thought’

(claiming of the nineteenth century that ‘every European, in what he could

say about the Orient, was ...a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally

ethnocentric’) with, on the other hand, a quite conservative preference for

that same humanist tradition (1991 [1978]: 204, 2004). Not only would Said

move, epistemologically, between Nietzschean critiques of objectivity

(‘truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they

are’) and Chomsky-like exhortations of the importance of ‘speaking truth to

power’ (Nietzsche 1954; Said 1991 [1978]: 203, 1994b: ch. 5). Not only did

Said (1999a) think of himself, biographically, as an ‘out of place’ exile and a

homeless outsider / despite his privileged background and his professional

location near the centre of liberal American culture. Not only did Said, for

some, walk a tightrope between being a detached literary scholar, on the one

hand, and pro-Palestinian polemicist, on the other / ‘Yasser Arafat’s man in

New York’, as one headline had it (Smith 1989). Not only this, but Said was

also seemingly unsure on certain directly political issues relating to the plight

and future of the Palestinians. Thus for many he appeared to combine a

hostility towards the nation-state and nationalism, with his well-known and

forceful championing of the Palestinian right to self-determination. Said also,

it is often claimed, switched from support for a two-state solution to the

Israeli-Palestinian conflict during the 1980s and 1990s, to advocacy of a

single bi-national state in the years before his death. The question necessarily

poses itself: what are we to make of all these supposed switches, tensions and

contradictions?

It seems to me that there are at least four possible answers. One could

respond that Said’s arguments were indeed ‘distinctly schizophrenic’,

however provocative and productive they might have been (Said in fact

admits as much of Orientalism , adding / a touch disingenuously perhaps /

that ‘I designed it that way’) (Mackenzie 1995: 5; Salusinszky 1987: 137).

One could respond, alternatively, as Joan Cocks does in this volume and

elsewhere, that the tensions within Said’s writings and life are testimony to

the ‘inevitability of subjective contradictions in human beings’ (2002: 150)

and are important and interesting precisely for that reason. Alternatively

again, one could interpret Said’s shifting and equivocal positions as a very

practical function of the diverse and fast-changing problems and audiences

which his work endeavoured and struggled to address, ranging from

questions of literary theory to the problem of Middle East peace, from the

.........................

era of Third Worldist post-colonial struggle to the contemporary ascendancy

of American neo-liberal imperialism. Or, fourth and finally, one might want

to insist that Said simply was not as inconsistent as may at first appear, and

that the antinomies and reversals that so pervade his thought are often

misread, and are not necessarily founded on logical contradictions.

There is something to be said, I think, for each of these interpretations, but

I want here to explore the latter two in particular since it is these which shed

most light, in my view, on the thorny question of nationalism, as well as on

the value of Said’s contributions. Said, let me assert first of all, was both

more consistent and much more modernist and humanist than is generally

recognized within postcolonial studies, and was not anti-nationalist (if by

that we imply hostility to the idea of nationhood, or to the institutional form

of the nation-state). Moreover, taken as a whole, Said’s oeuvre is sharply at

odds with the generally post-structuralist flavour of contemporary post-

colonial studies, this being true both of his substantive theoretical orienta-

tions, as well as of his stylistic and political distaste for the ‘generally

hermetic, jargon-ridden, unthreatening combativeness’ (Said 2004: 125) of

the modern academy. The irony, of course, is that Said and Orientalism in

particular were the formative influences on the field of postcolonial studies,

and continue to be key reference points in its development. Yet this, it seems

to me, is precisely where one of the main problems of interpretation arises,

namely that Said’s use of Foucault within his extraordinarily influential

Orientalism , combined with his deployment and articulation of some of the

key tropes of post-structuralist and postcolonial theory / his concern with

texts, representations, identity, hybridity, exile, resistance, etc. / has tended

to result in critics and followers alike viewing Said through a predominantly

postmodern lens (Ashcroft and Ahluwalia 2001: 13 / 14). Equally, Said’s

celebration of exile and his opposition to cultural homogeneity has, within

the context of a postcolonial field strongly hostile to nationalism and

statism, too often been misread as an anti-nationalist position. I argue below

that, interpreted outside the fold of postcolonial studies, it becomes evident

that Said was neither as post-structuralist nor as anti-nationalist, nor indeed

as contradictory, as may otherwise appear.

That said, the inconsistencies in Said’s work cannot all be interpreted

away in this fashion, for others of them remain / and result largely, I think,

from the diversity of locations, issues and audiences to which he tried to

speak. Said spoke to more different types of audience, and on a wider range

of exceedingly difficult themes, than any other late twentieth-century

intellectual. Thus, if we compare him, for instance, with Noam Chomsky

/ the only comparable figure in American intellectual life / it becomes

readily apparent just how disparate were the audiences and problems that

Said addressed. Across his work on both cognitive linguistics and interna-

tional politics, Chomsky speaks and writes in a philosophically naturalist

interventions / 8:1

EDWARD W. SAID: TRUTH, JUSTICE AND NATIONALISM

........................

Jan Selby

and realist key, with few tensions between his approaches to the two issue

areas; in his work on international politics, moreover, his central aim has

consistently been to expose the lies and double standards which underpin the

foreign policies of the United States and its local allies (see, e.g., Chomsky

1972, 1991). Said, by contrast, spoke on a diverse range of literary, cultural

and political issues that often demanded quite different epistemological

starting points; and in his essays and articles on Middle East politics he

addressed not only the abuses of US and Israeli policy, but also the

deficiencies of Arab politics and society (and Said was also, of course, a

participant in debates within the Palestinian national movement). Add to this

Said’s ‘worldliness’ (Said 1983) and his pragmatically grounded commitment

to each of these problem areas, and it is little wonder, I think, that there are

so many twists and tensions across his work.

This paper attempts to develop these arguments in relation to both the

broad contours of Said’s thinking, and the specific questions of nationalism

and the Palestinians. I argue that Said was above all a critical modernist

committed to truth and justice; that he was not anti-nationalist; and that he

was remarkably consistent, both philosophically and politically, across a

lengthy period of twenty-five years. But I also suggest that Said did struggle

with the problem of addressing diverse ‘worlds’, this being reflected in

tensions across his work. The Said that emerges here is both less radical and

less inconsistent than the Said who features in most postcolonial studies.

Whether this is adds to or detracts from his work is a question I leave to one

side. I begin by summarizing Said’s views on truth, justice and critique, and

only in subsequent sections do I turn to the questions first of nationalism and

the nation-state, and then of Palestinian rights and the one- and two-state

solutions.

Truth, justice, critique

Perhaps the best place to start exploring Said’s basic orientations is a debate

that took place in 1971 between Foucault and Chomsky, during which the

two of them set out their very different approaches to human nature,

knowledge, power and justice (and during which the interviewer, the Dutch

anarchist Fons Elders, also repeatedly attempted to disrupt the gravitas of

the occasion by placing an orange wig on Foucault’s bald head) (Elders

1974: 133 / 97; Wilkin 1999). During this encounter Chomsky set out his

views that serious social theory and analysis must be founded on some

conception of human nature, that it is the task of social science to analyse

reality and discover truths in the service of freedom and justice, and that true

knowledge stands in an oppositional relationship with power (as he puts it

elsewhere with characteristic clarity, ‘it is the responsibility of intellectuals to

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tell the truth and to expose lies’) (1967: 257). Foucault disagreed entirely. In

his view, human nature, truth and justice simply did not exist as a-historical

abstracts outside discourse and society, against which reality could be

evaluated and critiqued; for him, to the contrary, claims about ‘human

nature’, ‘truth’ and ‘justice’ were always themselves premised on and

implicated in ceaseless struggles for power. For Chomsky, truth and justice

can and do oppose power; in Foucault’s view, a Nietzschean will-to-power

governed all.

The relevance of this here is that both philosophically and politically, Said

was much closer to the modernist thinking of Chomsky than to the

archetypally postmodernist thinking of Foucault. Said did, of course, draw

heavily upon Foucault in Orientalism , analysing European scholarship and

literature on the Arab-Islamic world as a system of power-knowledge in the

service of (and to some extent constitutive of) imperial domination. But

thereafter Said quickly moves away from Foucault’s position that ‘power

and knowledge directly imply one another’, arguing that Foucault had an

overly sympathetic and insufficiently oppositional ‘imagination of power’

and had succumbed to ‘political hopelessness’ (Foucault 1977: 27; Said

1986a, 1997: 18). Furthermore, even in Orientalism Said holds not only to

the possibility, but also to the actuality, of the transcendence of Oriental-

ism ’s will-to-power: ‘I would not have undertaken a book of this sort,’ he

asserts in its concluding chapter, ‘if I did not also believe that there is

scholarship that is not as corrupt, or at least as blind to human reality, as the

kind I have been mainly depicting’ (and Said then lists a range of vigilant

individual scholars / Clifford Geertz, Maxime Rodinson, Roger Owen and

others / whose work he views as not dominated and disciplined by the ‘guild

tradition of Orientalism’) (1991 [1978]: 326). For Said, the central cause of

contemporary Orientalism is not some universal will-to-truth inherent even

within the best of scholarship, but rather ‘intellectual dishonesty’ and

‘dogmatic slumber’ (1991 [1978]: 327). Said acknowledges that this espousal

of a ‘non-repressive and non-manipulative perspective’, and of ‘non-

dominative and non-coercive knowledge’, is distinctly un-Foucauldian,

claiming that his argument is ‘deliberately anti-Foucault’ (1991 [1978]: 24,

1985: 15; Salusinszky 1987: 137). Even at its height, in Orientalism , Said’s

use of Foucault is remarkably thin.

And in his subsequent work, as well as in his parallel writings on US

imperialism and Middle East politics, this essentially modernist vein of Said’s

work is even more apparent. Chomsky’s work becomes a constant reference

point, with Said speaking with unstinting admiration for Chomsky’s

‘propaganda model’ of the American media (Herman and Chomsky 1988;

Said 1994c: 81), and for his dissections of American foreign policy and

Middle East politics (Said 1975, 1999b), and also claiming an inclination,

with Chomsky, for anarcho-syndicalism / even if this was only for its

interventions / 8:1

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