Though Arendt’s notion extended to a quartet of figures from a century ago, it was clearly a role Said identified with in his very contemporary presence as–even model for–the scholar-activist. And to an equal extent, Said faced, particularly over the last decade of his life, the less-than-ambivalent greeting extended to those who champion the most difficult of causes.
The images of hostility opportunistically deployed by those opposed to Said’s lifelong devotion to Palestinian recognition threaten in fact to occlude the magnitude of his achievement. Most famous is the much-publicized picture of Said, a member from 1977 to 1991 of the exile Palestine National Council, with stone in hand at the height of the second intifada. (The fact that the photograph was shot in Lebanon and the rock-throwing gesture was purely symbolic was less remembered.) Or the assertions, on the heels of the publication of Said’s 1999 memoir, “Out of Place,” that the Jerusalem-born critic had falsified crucial parts of his biography to overstate his Palestinian roots. (Again, a smoke-filled charge with little fire.) There were the rumors that Said was on a Jewish Defense League hit list and stories that he would be censured at Columbia University, where he taught from 1963 until his death at age 67 last week. One almost got the sense that the ubiquitous references in Said’s many obituaries to his high level of skill as a pianist and agility as a music critic for The Nation (from 1977 to 1991) were as much an attempt to humanize the man as a marker of his polymathic talents.
But perhaps these images count as little more than the byproduct of politics as usual, and politics exercised and experienced by a man who certainly made the mistakes (in judgment, in timing) any activist might be expected to make. Somehow, though, Said was held to a much higher standard than, one imagines, it would have been possible to meet. That raised bar curiously extends, I think, to his academic work as well, in particular his 1978 magnum opus, “Orientalism.”
With Said, it’s more than unfair to unhinge the scholarly and the political, of course. From his work in the mid-’70s through to his final book, the recent “Freud and the Non-European,” Said’s scholarship always contained a radical political component, and in titles like “The Question of Palestine” (1979) and “Covering Islam” (1981), his criticisms of the first Camp David meetings and media representation of Islam are nothing if not informed by his deep, ranging academic interests. Nonetheless, “Orientalism”–and the cottage industry of second-guessing it spawned on its own–illustrates the difficulties the public intellectual faces. And Said was a public intellectual like no other in this country. (Noam Chomsky certainly could claim to rival Said in terms of influence and activity, but the relation between his politics and work as a linguist exists on a level of abstraction foreign to Said’s efforts.) Indeed, the figure perhaps closest to Said in this regard is the French philosopher Michel Foucault, whose thought underwrites so much of “Orientalism.”
Said’s magisterial examination of the ideas, cultures, and histories that helped give rise to the sometimes coherent, sometimes inchoate structure of the “Orient” operated with the essential understanding that no knowledge or inquiry is pure. The thesis underlying the exhaustive survey of French and British writers, poets, naturalists and ethnographers is that the Orient was Orientalized not only because it was discovered to be “Oriental” in all those ways considered commonplace by the average 19th-century European, but also because it could be–that is, submitted to being–made Oriental. The sweep of Said’s argument, like all such endeavors, opened it up at once to God-is-in-the-details criticisms–arguments that the readings Said proffered of figures as varied in their notions of the Orient as Gautier and Gobineau could not be reconciled without the heavy lifting of generality. But today, with 25 years’ hindsight, what may be more at stake is the tremendous success of Said’s forceful argument–success, that is, in the academy, and the subsequent academicization of the thought behind it.
Is it possible for a work of such profound import to be at once a dazzling success and an utter failure? In the case of “Orientalism,” the answer seems to be yes. One has to bear in mind that, in 1978, hegemony was not a word heard in every college lecture hall, and the Foucauldian equation of power and knowledge had only barely made its passage across the Atlantic. Nor can the cross-pollination of academic departments since the book’s appearance be understated. To those of my generation who landed on campuses in the mid-1980s, when younger scholars were just in the process of becoming tenured radicals, the politicization of pure inquiry and the birth of departments like critical studies still seemed fresh and full of promising danger. It was not hard to see in Said a Jonathan Edwards anticipating a Great Awakening.
I suppose that time is long past, and if anything, Said’s great work has taken on the cast of being almost a relic–an orthodoxy in the academy, a forgotten doctrine outside. That split is tragic, given Said’s singular example as an intellectual engaged with the world, yet it may ultimately go the furthest to ratify his work. In the wake of 9/11 and the downward spiral in Israel following Sharon’s election in 2001, the most suspect ideologies of neo-Orientalism have once again found coin, in the media, in government and even in academia. The explanatory simplicities of the clash-of-civilizations thesis as propounded on editorial pages, the crusader vulgarities of the Anne Coulters and Oriana Fallacis, the journalistic use of “the Arab Street” to convey the what is seen as the teeming, undifferentiated, impenetrable ways of the Arab underclass, whether in Cairo or Dubai–they all are symptoms of the uncritical thinking that Said labored mightily against. Perhaps there is no better way to celebrate Said’s spirit than to sit down, once again, with “Orientalism.” The conscious pariah’s quarter-decade-old volume may be a familiar antidote, but it is no less effective a medicine for the ailing body politic now as it was then.
