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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx

a moral hole « Previous | |Next »
August 06, 2003

I have been reading Edward Said's article over at Counterpunch entitled 'Orientalism 25 Years Later.' I had read his book Orientalism many years ago when an undergraduate student. I was impressed by the concept of 'discourse' (which I had interpreted as Kant+Hegel as I had not read Foucault then). But I realized that it was a book that would not be part of the philosophy curriculum. It was not philosophy as the academics understood it.

I cannot recall much of the book's detail. But I remember tacitly accepting that the thesis that the West had constructed a particular conception of the Orient---a semi-mythical construct; and that historical construct was imposed on reality and became reality for us. It was the lens through which we viewed the Middle East and Asia.

I read very little of Said after that, apart from the odd article here and there. He was a literary theorist and I was in a philosophy discipline so there was little cross over between the two institutions.

Now all that was before the days before the clash of civilizations, the spectre of Islam haunted the West, and the discourse of a monolithic and violent (fundamentalist) Islam was demonized as a threat to Western civilization and to America's hegemonic power in the Middle East. The prejudice to Islam runs deep, and it is reinforced by the images of the recently bombed Marriott Hotel in Jakarta:

MarriotHotel.jpg

The commentators, journalists and politicians are saying that the bombing bore the hallmarks of the Indonesian terror network Jemaah Islamiah; the al-Qaeda-linked group that is fighting to install a pan-Islamic state in South-East Asia, and which has also been blamed for last October's Bali bomb attack. Seeing the images on television activates our resentment and anger. We recall Bali and September 11. They images also reinforce the tacit acceptance of the duality of the life and death battle between the pro-terrorists who hate tolerance, democracy and freedom and the pro-civilization forces who defend tolerance, democracy and freedom.

We live this duality. We do not see it as a matter of prejudice, nor as black and white cartoon thinking. It is reality. The way things really are. It cuts reality at its joints and it means that it is time to take sides. There can be no doubt about good and evil. Those people over there are not like "us" and they do not appreciate "our" values. Thus we have very core of traditional Orientalist discourse with new content.

That is the cultural and political context in which I read Said's article. Said is writing an afterword to Orientalism, He says that though it is 25 years on, little has shifted in terms of the structure of the discourse of Orientalism. He says:

"I wish I could say that general understanding of the Middle East, the Arabs and Islam in the United States has improved somewhat, but alas, it really hasn't....In the US, the hardening of attitudes, the tightening of the grip of demeaning generalization and triumphalist cliches the dominance of crude power allied with simplistic contempt for dissenters and "others" has found a fitting correlative in the looting and destruction of Iraq's libraries and museums."

An accurate description of where we are now. We are living in a new form of Orientalism as a knowledge/power, and this shapes our comportment in the world. Said then describes this discourse thus:
'What our leaders and their intellectual lackeys seem incapable of understanding is that history cannot be swept clean like a blackboard, clean so that "we" might inscribe our own future there and impose our own forms of life for these lesser people to follow....In the process the uncountable sediments of history, that include innumerable histories and a dizzying variety of peoples, languages, experiences, and cultures, all these are swept aside or ignored, relegated to the sand heap along with the treasures ground into meaningless fragments that were taken out of Baghdad.'

I have no problems with that as an account of the encultured reality we are now living. No doubt we can quibble about the details, but it is basically the cultural construct that we use to enframe events such as the reconstruction of Iraq or the bombing of Marriott Hotel. Said then makes a distinction between different forms of knowledge, and makes some tough lefty judgements.
"There is, after all, a profound difference between the will to understand for purposes of co-existence and enlargement of horizons, and the will to dominate for the purposes of control. It is surely one of the intellectual catastrophes of history that an imperialist war confected by a small group of unelected US officials was waged against a devastated Third World dictatorship on thoroughly ideological grounds having to do with world dominance, security control, and scarce resources, but disguised for its true intent, hastened, and reasoned for by Orientalists who betrayed their calling as scholars."

That paragraph and others like it will raise hackles. And they are calculated to do so. Said's rhetoric is designed to ensure that. And Norman Geras responds. So does Brad de Long. (I'm having problems with the linking.) It is the responses by Geras and Brad de Long that we need to consider. Can they dig out the weakness/flaws in Said's argument about the discourse of Orientalism?

Brad de Long makes two charges. He claims that Edward Said pledges allegiance to poverty, dictatorship, and keeping women illiterate and barefoot. Now Brad is not clear why this is the case as he offers no argument. But, I presume, it has to do with Said questioning the Enlightenment tradition. If you do that you are opposed to progress, knowledge and favour totalitariansm. You support a fundamentalist Islam in other words. Its a pretty standard charge.

Let us suppose that this is what sits behind Brad's claim. What disappoints her is that Brad makes no attempt at all to square his claim with Said's explicit commitment to the values of humanism----reflection, debate, rational argument, and moral principle based on a secular notion that human must create their own history. Some engagement is necessary to justify the claim. Nothing is forthing. There is no argument.

Secondly, Brad claims that in Said's text the only hint of agency in events, such as:

"...the failure of the Oslo peace process;....the outbreak of the second intifada;...the awful suffering of the Palestinians;...the suicide bombing phenomenon;... apocalyptic ... events of September 11 2001 and their aftermath in the wars against Afghanistan and Iraq;....the illegal occupation of Iraq by Britain and the United States..."

is laid at the door of Britain and the United States. In contrast, the other catastrophes "simply happen: Said's rhetoric tries to push them as close as possible to random catastrophes of nature rather than recognize them as the deliberate and intended actions of evil, insane, or desperate human beings."

Once again let us accept this interpretation. I suspect that what lies behind the claim is the assumption that discourse analysis is anti-humanists and anti-humanism has a passive conception of human beeings. They are but the vehicles of the discourse. This is difficult to lay on Said becuase he explictly flags his humanaissm through out the article. You would need to argue your case.

What is disappointing is that once again no attempt is made by Brad to square the passivity charge with Said's commitment to humanist notion that human beings must create their own history. Or to the way that Said talks about the sense of the density and interdependence of human life being brushed aside by simplistic categories, policies and actions. There is lots of other stuff in Said's text that is relvent: eg., the slow working together of cultures that overlap, borrow from each other, and live together in interesting ways; humanism being centered upon the agency of human individuality and subjective intuition, rather than on received ideas and approved authority; and humanism being the only and the final resistance we have against the inhuman practices and injustices that disfigure human history. These phrases give us a more active conception of human beings. But Brad ignores them.

Brad, in short, does not engage with Said. So it is hard to concur with the judgement by Abiola over at Foreign Dispatches that Brad has a withering take down of Said. Takedown? It doesn't even happen.

Let us turn to Geras. His case is different. He spots a moral hole in the Said's paragraph, which includes the phrase "an imperialist war confected by a small group of unelected US officials was waged against a devastated Third World dictatorship on thoroughly ideological grounds." Geras is very sensitive to moral holes because he holds that Marx, and the Marxist tradtion, failed to recognize its own ethical impulses and principles. Geras wants to bring this normative content fully into the open. So he is sensitive to the evasion of the ethical by the left. Does Said evade the ethical---ie., only talks politics and ends up in a morally bad place?

Geras interprets Said's above passage as "some nasty unelected confecters beating up on a poor devastated dictatorship." Fair enough. It's a bit rough but it will do, as the concern here is with moral holes. Geras then fingers the moral hole:

"The moral hole...is right there, free-standing, in that devastated dictatorship. Can this really be what Said meant? Should it not have read 'devastating dictatorship'? For this is, in truth, what the Baathist regime was. It wrecked the lives of countless Iraqis and the country as a whole. Devastated is what the dictatorship became after the military intervention of the Coalition."

You have to re-read that. Is it just a semantic point about devastated dictatorship and devastating dictatorship? No says Geras firmly. The moral hole has to do with the structure of meaning of the discourse. So what is the structure of meaning? Geras:
"Well, here's a suggestion. 'Devastated third world dictatorship' embraces, in one sweep, both the regime and the country. Calling it a dictatorship is distance taken from upfront apologia: you see, he knows. But calling it devastated, before (as a regime) it was devastated, this effects a shift from the regime to the country which it had brought to ruin. It is the standard move, a move now more than a decade old. Eliding the difference between the regime and the nation enables you to be on the side of the nation, of the people - Afghans, Iraqis, whoever - even while making yourself a would-be obstacle to terminating the power of their oppressors."

The paragraph is a bit dense. We can clear some things out of the way. There is no doubt that the Baath regime of Saddam Hussein devasted the country and was devasted (destroyed) by the Americans. There is no doubt that Said is on the side of the Iraqi (and Palestinian) people and that he sees, and is critical, of the imperial intrusion into the Middle East by western powers. There is no doubt that Said uses humanistic studies to contest both the simplified view of the world that a relative handful of Pentagon civilian elites have formulated for US policy in the entire Arab and Islamic worlds; and a media that assigns itself the role of producing so-called "experts" who validate the government's general line. And there is no doubt that Said contests this discourse through reflection, debate, rational argument,. There is doubt(ie., it is what Brad contests) that Said contents this discourse with the humanist moral principle based on a secular notion that human must create their own history.

That clears the ground around the moral hole. Do we have a moral hole based on 'devastated third world dictatorship'? Is there a collapse of the difference between regime and country? A first response is that it is totalitarianism that elides the difference between regime and country---not Said. There is no civil society in totalitarianism. Iraq is all state. The state's tentacles are everywhere, reaching into family life. Iraq was also one big welfare state.

Geras would know this. So what is Geras getting at? Where does Said slip up ethically? Geras realizes that he is only working from a phrase and that it needs a lot of digging to uncover the moral hole. So he directs us to this interview. Reading it we where find that a hole is a gap; there is a real gap in Said's thinking; a gap to be repaired. So what is the moral gap? Geras then directs us to this paragraph towards the end of the interview:

"Complementing the horizontal shift by which attention was drawn away from al-Qaida's responsibility for the crimes of September 11 to America's responsibility for them, there was also a vertical shift, to denature the war that followed. Facing west, opponents of military action would look up and see the US government. But facing east, they looked down and saw the people of Afghanistan. They were on their side and against the US government. It is a transparent game – become all too grimly familiar as a way of bracketing off certain unsavoury political 'mediations'."

So Said draws attention away from the Iraqi' regime's responsibility for the terror to its own people and direct it to America's responsibility for them. He also makes a vertical shift, to denature the war. Facing west, Said would see the imperial US government. When facing east, he saw the people of Iraq. He was on their side and against the imperial US government.

And the moral hole? The elision of the ethical?

Geras is arguing that Said sets up a rough moral equivalence between the US government and those it was actually at war with. Equivalence means that we were supposed to think that George W. Bush and what he represented, on one side, were on a level with Sadam Hussein and what he represented, on the other. The hole is that the America is not morally or politically equivalent, even approximately, to the Saddam Hussein's which is far far worse.

That is the argument. The implication is that the values of humanism and cultural tolerance are engaged on the side of anti-war viewpoint, which, if it had prevailed, would have had the torturers in Baghdad still at work today. An he wrote the essay in a country that embodies the values of humanism and cultural tolerance.

Is Said justifying the Baath regime? Does he end up here due to his hostility to the US imperialism. I will try and answer this in terms of how Said understands humanist critique to work on the discourse of Orientalism. I will do it in quotations because it is important that we actually read Said's text. How we read is crucial to Said's argument. It is going to be slow going but it is necessary as we have to remove the distortions impsoed by Geras on Said's text.

As is well known Said is deeply critical of those who help to construct the discouse of Orientalism. He says the:

"....bookstores in the US are filled with shabby screeds bearing screaming headlines about Islam and terror, Islam exposed, the Arab threat and the Muslim menace, all of them written by political polemicists pretending to knowledge imparted to them and others by experts who have supposedly penetrated to the heart of these strange Oriental peoples."

He then adds:
"Accompanying such war-mongering expertise have been CNN and Fox, plus myriad evangelical and right-wing radio hosts, innumerable tabloids and even middle-brow journals, all of them re-cycling the same unverifiable fictions and vast generalizations so as to stir up "America" against the foreign devil."

He criticises this discourse by drawing attention to the gap between the discourse and the ideals of the empire:
"Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others, that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort. And, sadder still, there always is a chorus of willing intellectuals to say calming words about benign or altruistic empires."

How does this situated criticism work? Said is quite clear:
"Therefore it would seem to be a vital necessity for independent intellectuals always to provide alternative models to the simplifying and confining ones based on mutual hostility that have prevailed in the Middle East and elsewhere for so long."

How is this to be done? Said says through the interpreting texts in a specifc way:

"Rather than alienation and hostility to another time and a different culture, philology as applied to Weltliteratur involved a profound humanistic spirit deployed with generosity and, if I may use the word, hospitality. Thus the interpreter's mind actively makes a place in it for a foreign Other. And this creative making of a place for works that are otherwise alien and distant is the most important facet of the interpreter's mission."

This requires special skills that are now being lost. But we could link to Iraqi bloggers as a start, or we could read Arab media. But Said offers us a warning as we enter the reversal of the imperial discourse: one that is called anti-Americanism. Saddam Hussein was a master of this and he used it to make himself a Arab hero standing up to the American invasion of an Arab country. Said says:
"In the Arab and Muslim countries the situation [as Roula Khalaf has argued] the region has slipped into an easy anti-Americanism that shows little understanding of what the US is really like as a society. Because the governments are relatively powerless to affect US policy toward them, they turn their energies to repressing and keeping down their own populations, with results in resentment, anger and helpless imprecations that do nothing to open up societies where secular ideas about human history and development have been overtaken by failure and frustration, as well as by an Islamism built out of rote learning and the obliteration of what are perceived to be other, competitive forms of secular knowledge."

What has been lost in the Arab world is their own tradition of skills that are crucial for the sensitive and critical humanist reading of the anti-American discourse. Said says:
"The gradual disappearance of the extraordinary tradition of Islamic ijtihad or personal interpretation has been one of the major cultural disasters of our time, with the result that critical thinking and individual wrestling with the problems of the modern world have all but disappeared."

But we are not trapped between Orientalism and its rejection. This is an important point. Geras claims that Said slides into the anti-Americanism of the Arabs and so ends up justifiying Saddam Hussein's dictatorship.Its either /or for Geras. But Said refuses to trapped in this way. He unpacks the either/or of Geras through finding other pathways. Said explicitly says there are other models on the table:
"This is not to say that the cultural world has simply regressed on one side to a belligerent neo-Orientalism and on the other to blanket rejectionism.Last year's United Nations World Summit in Johannesburg, for all its limitations, did in fact reveal a vast area of common global concern that suggests the welcome emergence of a new collective constituency that gives the often facile notion of "one world" a new urgency."

This may be pretty thin. But it is quite different to what Geras is claiming Said is doing, namely morally justifying Saddam Hussein's dictatorship by saying that it is morally equivalent to US imperialism. Said is actually providing a way for Arabs and us in the West to contest Orientalism of the West and the anti-Americanism of the Arab world. The concept of world with its "real interdependence of parts that leaves no genuine opportunity for isolation" is in a different space to Orientalism and anti-Americanism. We are standing on different ground.

Said says this alternative pathway of "one world" means that we need to:

"...concentrate on the slow working together of cultures that overlap, borrow from each other, and live together in far more interesting ways than any abridged or inauthentic mode of understanding can allow."

This middle way is no pie in the sky or a fiction. Said says that:
"The world-wide protests before the war began in Iraq would not have been possible were it not for the existence of alternative communities all across the world, informed by alternative information, and keenly aware of the environmental, human rights, and libertarian impulses that bind us together in this tiny planet."

This may be woolley cosmopolitanism to many---but, hell, let's recognize that we are a long way from what Geras is saying about Said. Geras got it badly wrong.

Geras picked the wrong target for his claim about the moral hole of the left. And he proved Said's point. Geras did not read Said''s text closely or sympathetically for the argument as a philosopher should. The humanist skills of interpretation have indeed been lost in the analytic philosophy that Geras works within.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:49 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (2)
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