Edward Said’s Untidiness
In memoriam: Edward Said (1935-2003)
Theory must needs deal with cross-grained, opaque, unassimilated material.
— Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia
With so many dissonances in my life I have learned actually to prefer being not quite right and out of place.
— Edward W. Said, Out of Place: A Memoir
Edward Said’s death has deprived us of a voice more needed today than ever before. His was the voice that reminded us that there is a fundamental untidiness to all systems of knowledge and explanation, and that we must therefore question grand simplifications about the clash of civilizations and unidirectional roadmaps to peace that ignore a long and complex history of occupation and oppression. At a time when thought seems to travel along facile, Manichean axes of good and evil, Said’s adherence to a difficult and unsettling dialectical practice exemplifies all that is best in critical thought. In what follows, I wish to pay tribute to the role played by untidiness as a dialectical form of worldly criticism in Said’s work.
In the days immediately following the appalling events of September 11, 2001, many politicians, media pundits, and accredited experts sought to assuage the American public’s fear, uncertainty, and bewilderment through the reassuring simplicity of a Manichean explanation in which “freedom” was opposed to “terrorism,” “good” to “evil,” and “the West” to “Islam.” Responding to the dangers of such neatly reductive binary oppositions, Said has called for a more patient, informed, and critical stance. “We need,” he writes
to step back from the imaginary thresholds that supposedly separate people from each other into supposedly clashing civilizations and re-examine the labels. ... “Islam” and “the West” are simply inadequate as banners to follow blindly. Some will run behind them, of course, but for future generations to condemn themselves to prolonged war and suffering without so much as a critical pause, without looking at interdependent histories of injustice and oppression, without trying for common emancipation and mutual enlightenment seems far more wilful than necessary. (“Collective Passion”)
In Said’s view, the ideological certainty promoted by such formulations as Samuel Huntington’s “the clash of civilizations” disregards the internal differences, the heterodoxy and restlessness, the complex disputes that run through every culture or civilization. “To Huntington,” Said remarks,
“civilization identity” is a stable and undisturbed thing, like a roomful of furniture in the back of your house. This is extremely far from the truth, not just in the Islamic world but throughout the entire surface of the globe. To emphasize the differences among cultures and civilizations ... is completely to ignore the literally unending debate or contest ... about defining the culture or civilization within those civilizations, including various “Western” ones. These debates completely undermine any idea of a fixed identity, and hence of relationships between identities.
(“The Clash of Definitions” 581)
In short, a civilization or culture is more like a messy room than one with neatly stacked furniture.
To Said, therefore, no single theoretical formulation can hope to fix or capture the complex, turbulent forces that shape our world. Like Theodor Adorno, whose work has greatly influenced his own, Said is suspicious of identitarian thought, “of the imposition of logical consistency on a world that should be nonidentical to its concept, insisting that conceptual representations can never be fully adequate to their objects” (Jay 264).[1] Replying to a question by Jennifer Wicke and Michael Sprinker about whether a global theory is necessary, Said clearly expressed his preference for the irresolution of “untidiness” over the satisfactions of “totalization”:
The most important thing ... has been the absence of a master theory. ... It seems to me that the attempt to invent or devise a discourse that is adequate in its universal contours and detailed power to the new forces of the media or the new social forces outside Europe has not met with great success. It seems to me to have missed a lot of the contradictions, a lot of the untidiness of the moment. ... I don’t see the need for a master discourse or a theorization of the whole. (240-41)
To the master discourse or theory whose imperial gaze seeks to command the whole field of human endeavor, Said opposes and celebrates what he calls “hybrid counter-energies.” As he explains in the closing pages of Culture and Imperialism,
The authoritative, compelling image of the empire, which crept into and overtook so many procedures of intellectual mastery that are central in modern culture, finds its opposite in the renewable, almost sporty discontinuities of intellectual and secular impurities — mixed genres, unexpected combinations of tradition and novelty, political experiences based on communities of effort and interpretation ... rather than classes or corporations of possession, appropriation, and power. (335)
At this point, however, a sceptic may well ask: But isn’t Said’s preference for “untidiness” and theoretical impurity at odds with his best known book, Orientalism? Isn’t it a work of totalization, a resolute and systematic account of the West’s discursive construction and representation of a geographical and socio-cultural entity called “the Orient”? How can Said be sensitive to “the untidiness of the moment,” yet produce a work that provides a powerful description of the consistency and coherence of Orientalist discourse? How can we explain this performative contradiction?
Lauded by Homi Bhabha as the work that “inaugurated the postcolonial field” and recognized by Gayatri Spivak as “the source book of postcolonial theory” (cited in Moore-Gilbert 35), Said’s Orientalism, published over two decades ago, has nonetheless been subjected over the years to many sharp critiques — critiques that attest to the book’s continuing power to provoke debate. These critiques have generally adopted two lines of attack on the book’s alleged performative contradiction: first, the book is accused of replicating the essentializing tendencies of Orientalism that it seeks to repudiate; and, second, it is criticized for relying on the universalizing or totalizing concept of humanism to oppose the equally totalizing tendencies of Orientalist discourse.
According to the first line of attack, even as the European discursive formation called Orientalism is accused by Said of imaginatively constructing an essentialized, holistic Orient, so the same Orientalist discursive system and the Europe it originated from are, in turn, essentialized in Said’s criticism, for they are seen, in Aijaz Ahmad’s words, as “unified, self-identical, transhistorical, textual” (183). Such a reading of Said’s book ignores, however, the dialectical tension between the work’s Foucauldian recognition of Orientalism’s sheer discursive power and its insistence that Orientalist discourse, however overpowering, cannot finally overcome the differences within itself or completely subsume the eccentric, the anomalous, the individual. A careful reading of the book will reveal that Said has always been aware of the possibilities of disorientation within Orientalism itself.
It is no doubt true that Said in attempting to convey the strength and power of the Orientalist project often overemphasizes its homogeneity, its monolithic and apparently unchanging representation of the Orient. It appears as though Said’s adoption of Foucault’s theory of discourse obliges him to believe that it is the sheer material presence or weight of discourse, “not the originality of a given author [that] is really responsible for the texts produced out of it” (Orientalism 94). This has led critics to complain, as Gyan Prakash has noted, “that Said wove the ‘knitted-together strength’ of the Orientalist discourse too tight, that he allowed little room for variation, change, ambivalence, [and] that he essentialized the Orientalists” (206), and, by extension, the West in which Orientalism took shape. In short, as James Clifford has remarked, Said’s book “sometimes appears to mimic the essentializing discourse it attacks” (262). In presenting us with an unvarying and systemic description of the West’s unchanging view of the Orient, Said is guilty of an Orientalism-in-reverse, of Occidentalism.
But critics who charge Said of being theoretically inconsistent or contradictory are in fact scratching where there is no itch. The Said they accuse of homogenizing Orientalist discourse into an unchanging system is also the Said who says that we have to treat “the cultural, historical phenomenon of Orientalism as a kind of willed human work — not of mere unconditioned ratiocination — in all its historical complexity, detail, and worth” (Orientalism 15). The Foucauldian Said who is described by critics as advancing a view of Orientalism as a monolithic and impersonal discursive structure is also the anti-Foucauldian intellectual who explicitly states that, unlike Foucault, he believes “in the determining imprint of individual writers upon the otherwise anonymous collective body of texts constituting a discursive formation like Orientalism” (Orientalism 23). This is the Said who, far from seeing Orientalism as homogenous, argues that there is space in it “for the play of a personal — or at least non-Orientalist — consciousness” and who offers as an example the poet, Gerard de Nerval, whose “Orient untied itself from anything resembling an Orientalist conception of the Orient, even though his work depends on Orientalism to a certain extent” (Orientalism 158, 183). Said acknowledges, of course, the pervasive influence and extensive conceptual reach of Orientalist discourse in Western thought and culture. How could he not, intimately familiar as he is with the history of European colonialism? But Said also sees the possibility of difference and resistance from within Orientalism itself. A disorienting impulse exists within Orientalism and the figure of the Orientalist scholar, Louis Massignon, is, according to Said, exemplary in this regard. Though firmly attached to the tradition of French Orientalism, Massignon’s work nonetheless allows us a glimpse of “the personal style, the individual genius ... [which] may finally supersede the political restraints operating impersonally through tradition and through the national ambience.” In his work, Massignon showed “the extent to which his ideas about the Orient could transcend the local anecdotal circumstances of a Frenchman and of French society.” Referring further to contemporary scholars of the Orient such as Jacques Berque and Maxime Rodinson, Said asserts unequivocally that “scholars and critics who are trained in the traditional Orientalist disciplines are perfectly capable of freeing themselves from the old ideological straightjacket” (Orientalism 271, 274, and 326).[2]
Said thus regards Orientalism both as a tightly knit discursive totality and an inconsistent, heterogeneous formation that does not exclude inner difference and dissension. Said’s critics, however, apply an “either-or” logic to his “both-and” approach and, consequently, fault Said for methodological or theoretical contradiction. But Said welcomes contradiction and inconsistency. As he remarked in an interview: “I am invariably criticized by younger post-colonialists (Ahmad, etcetra) for being inconsistent and untheoretical, and I find that I like that — who wants to be consistent?” (Ashcroft 8). Elsewhere, he says, “Orientalism is theoretically inconsistent, and I designed it that way: I didn’t want Foucault’s method, or anybody’s method, to override what I was trying to put forward” (Salusinszky 137). Said embraces inconsistency and contradiction because he believes in the need for a critical method supple enough to track the complex interplay of consistency and inconsistency in the discourses and practices that shape the world we live in. That is why, in his “Afterword” to the 1995 Penguin reissue of Orientalism, Said rejects his critics’ call for theoretical consistency and systematic rigour:
Orientalism, and indeed all of my other work, has come in for disapproving attacks because of its “residual” humanism, its theoretical inconsistencies, its insufficient, perhaps even sentimental, treatment of agency. I am glad that it has! Orientalism is a partisan book, not a theoretical machine. ... The interest I took in Orientalism as a cultural phenomenon ... derives from its variability and unpredictability, both qualities that give writers like Massignon and Burton their surprising force, and even attractiveness. What I tried to preserve in my analysis of Orientalism was its combination of consistency and inconsistency, its play, so to speak. (340-41)
It is important to note that Said does not deny the importance of Orientalism or other discursive systems; he is all too aware of the power they wield. What he rejects is the view that these systems or the theories that explain them have to be consistent and systematic. He wishes to show instead that a system like Orientalism is not consistent at all points and that it is for this reason that there can be hope for Orientalism’s own disorientation and dissolution. In short, Homi Bhabha’s criticism that Orientalism is rather monolithic in its account of the intentionality and unidirectionality of colonial power (The Location of Culture 71-72) is somewhat misplaced, since Said had already recognized, before Bhabha introduced his theory of colonial ambivalence, that a certain inconsistency or ambiguity accompanies all Orientalist discourses. Bhabha’s concept of ambivalence is the result of a productive amnesia. In calling for greater theoretical consistency, then, it is Said’s critics who reveal themselves as systematizers, as neo-Orientalists contrary to their own aims. What they have failed to understand is the creative and enabling paradox at the centre of Said’s work, a paradox anticipated in Friedrich Schlegel’s pithy statement: “It is equally fatal to the mind to have system and to have none. It will simply have to combine the two” (cited in Strong and Sposito 283).
A second criticism of Said’s book emerges at this point. Critics like James Clifford and Robert Young have argued that Said’s disorienting of Orientalism, his opposition to Orientalism’s essentializing and totalizing logic relies on an appeal to a humanism that aspires, in Clifford’s words, to “the universalist power that speaks for humanity” while neglecting to note that this universalism is “a privilege invented by a totalizing Western liberalism” (263). In Robert Young’s succinct formulation:
But, against Clifford and Young, I wish to argue that Said’s “humanism” is not the humanism of the Cartesian sovereign consciousness or autonomous subject celebrated by Western Enlightenment thought. Despite Said’s valorization of such literary humanist tags as “personal style” and “individual genius,” he is also supremely aware that “the works of even the most eccentric artist are constrained and acted upon by society, by cultural traditions, by worldly circumstance” (Orientalism 201). At the same time, however, Said also argues that “no one has convincingly shown that individual effort is not at some profoundly unteachable level ... eccentric; this despite the existence of systems of thought, discourses and hegemonies” (“Afterword” 340). Said wants to maintain a “dialectic between individual text or writer and the complex collective formation to which his work is a contribution” (Orientalism 24). It is a dialectic, however, that has no Hegelian resolution since Said, in true Adornian fashion, sees the eccentricity of the individual as a kind of unassimilable singularity that prevents conceptual closure and keeps the dialectic open and ongoing. Said’s “humanism” must, therefore, be read catachrestically as a productive misuse of the term which forces us to rethink the “human” not as a totalizing or universalizing subject, but as that unassimilable force, that recalcitrant and resistant messiness that disturbs discursive systems and theories.
Said opposes the complexity of human experience to what he sees as the simplifications of system. “It seems a common human failing,” Said writes, “to prefer the schematic authority of a text to the disorientations of direct encounters with the human” (Orientalism 93). But, according to Clifford, Said’s recourse to the “human” results in “humanist fables of suppressed authenticity” (269). The trouble with Said’s humanism, Clifford explains, is that it posits an authentic human reality that is universal and unmediated by local cultural codes. Seeking to uphold human reality, Said ends up instead with a simplified, abstract universalism unconnected to any actual human culture. Clifford writes:
Said characterizes the human realities thus elided [in Orientalist accounts] with quotations from Yeats — “‘the uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor,’ in which all humans live” ... It is still an open question, of course, whether an African pastoralist shares the same existential “bestial floor” with an Irish poet and his readers. (263)
Clifford sees in Said’s use of the Yeats quotation Said’s confident belief in a universal humanity. But in concentrating his critical gaze on Said’s appeal to the universality of the “bestial floor” in which we all live, Clifford ignores Said’s inclusion of the “uncontrollable mystery” (my emphasis) which exceeds and disrupts all theoretical attempts at understanding or defining a universal humanity. In other words, while Clifford sees the Yeats quotation as reflecting Said’s untroubled faith in a universal humanity, I think Said discerns in the Yeats quotation a recognition of how human reality escapes the grasp of totalizing discursive or theoretical systems like Orientalism. For Said, our humanity is not based on an abstract common denominator, on the “bestial floor” as existential universal that Clifford rightly suspects is not shared by African pastoralist and Irish poet; our humanity lies rather in its “uncontrollable mystery,” its unassimilability and resistance to all universalizing systems of knowledge. Clifford sees Said’s “humanism” as acultural and essentialist, an untroubled fable of universal humanity. Said, I believe on the contrary, sees his “humanism” not as a declaration of certainty about some human essence but as the critical knowledge that human reality finally escapes the determinations of system and theory, and that this escape enables us to understand humanity not as fixed essence but as open-ended possibility. In his Presidential Address to the MLA in 1999, a talk entitled “Humanism and Heroism,” Said cites favourably Adorno’s argument for the inexhaustibility of human thought:
Thinking is not the intellectual reproduction of what already exists anyway. As long as it doesn’t break off, thinking has a secure hold on possibility. Its insatiable aspect, its aversion to being quickly and easily satisfied, refuses the foolish wisdom of resignation. ... Open thinking points beyond itself. (290)
This “humanism” that paradoxically questions its own achievements, this notion of human thought as indeterminable excess, as unassimilable remainder or supplement in the Derridean sense, is present in Said’s writing even before the publication of Orientalism. In his 1975 book, Beginnings, Vico is praised for making theory and actual experience adjacent and interchangeable. Said writes: “The notion of man, as the humanist conceives it, and the experience that man actually undergoes, in all its untidy diversity, are for Vico two sides of the same coin.” He approves of the way in which Vico “pitted the wealth of human diversity against the poverty of philosophy mathematically considered” (Beginnings 349 and 368). In his 1976 essay, “Vico on the Discipline of Bodies and Texts,” Said again praises Vico’s “insight that there is always something outside mere logical sense to be engaged and dealt with when human reality is discussed” and that this reality is centred on the body with its “untidy, immediate, sprawling largeness” (819). More recently, in a 1997 interview with Jacqueline Rose, Said maintains that his work continues to explore the provisionality and possibility that make up human reality: “What I say is the result of an effort for me which I’m presenting with every possibility that I’ll be proved wrong. There is something about reality which is resistant ... to settled analysis” (75). James Clifford’s criticism of Said’s “humanism” is thus only partly correct. If Said is a humanist, he is, like Adorno, a “negative humanist,” a humanist critical of the humanistic enterprise without necessarily descending into nihilism. As he says in his MLA Presidential Address, “perhaps we can ... imagine paradoxically a nonhumanistic humanist” (290).
It is important to remember that Said’s critique of discursive systems and theories does not mean that he rejects them in toto. After all, Orientalism is a sustained examination of the efficacy and power of a European discursive system. But, while he is aware that we cannot do without systems and theories, Said also believes that they do not have the last word on our reality or our world. As he puts it: “Theory we certainly need, for all sorts of reasons. ... What we also need over and above theory, however, is the critical recognition that there is no theory capable of covering, closing off, predicting all the situations in which it might be useful.” Theory must therefore accept its own limitations and acknowledge that it cannot fully accommodate “the essential untidiness, the essential unmasterable presence that constitutes a large part of historical and social situations” (“Traveling Theory” 241).
It should be clear by now that “untidiness” does not mean critical sloppiness or lackadaisical scholarship; it does not mean that “anything goes.” “Untidiness” means that a question or a problem cannot often be tidily answered or resolved or subsumed under a totalizing, systematic explanation or theory. “Untidiness” points to the limits of system and theory, thereby avoiding hasty closure, inviting more questions, keeping discourse open to the future, to what Derrida punningly calls a-venir, the yet-to-come. “Untidiness” demands both critical rigor and critical humility, the ability to understand both system and that which lies beyond system, to understand theory at its limits.
The notion of “untidiness” as the limits of theory has generated many new critical projects. I’ll name just two: first, Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic which interrupts established accounts of European modernity through a reading of the African diaspora, introducing to the standard narrative of modernity, in Gilroy’s words, “untidy elements in a story of hybridization and intermixture that inevitably disappoints the desire for cultural and therefore racial purity” (199); and second, the subaltern studies historian Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe which shows how subaltern “singularity” can destabilize Occidental historiography by defying “the generalizing impulse of the sociological [and historical] imagination” (83), a generalizing impulse backed by the grand narratives of European modernity that are still so much a part of our academic disciplines.
Said’s preference for “untidiness” over consistency, his rejection of explanatory systems that achieve certainty at the cost of simplifying the unyielding complexity of our world, is more necessary today than ever before. In late October 2001, the Washington Post columnist Jim Hoagland advised George W. Bush to step up his campaign against “global terrorism.” “No nation,” Hoagland urged the President, “should expect you to pursue diplomacy as usual or assume it will not face your wrath in some form if it does not co-operate with you now. ... You are in a position of strength, not weakness. ... Dare to see the connections, dare to pursue them, dare to win, Mr. President” (cited in Gee A13). The President and the Pentagon dared to see the connections, connections that led all the way to Baghdad, connections based on a potent mix of patriotism, paranoia, and phantom WMDs. It is possible, I think, to argue that it was a similar belief in the righteousness of their cause, a similar fear of the Other, a similar confidence in their own totalizing worldview, that impelled the men who in daring to see the connections, and in daring to pursue them, also dared to pilot the planes into the towers. Perhaps we may have been spared the resulting horrors in New York, Afghanistan, and Iraq if the connections had not been drawn so resolutely or systematically, if an anomalous or dissenting thought had arisen to trouble the totalizing logic of hijackers, columnist and President alike. Fanaticism is the sanctioned refusal to see anything other than the fully connected, neatly established whole. Seamus Deane, in an insightful review of Said’s recent memoir, tells us that “The ideology of the wholly pervasive is never wholly persuasive. Some coign of vantage must be allowed” (4). Recognizing the power of the whole, yet rejecting its tidy and consoling resolution for the risks of possibility, Said’s work has always allowed for some “coign of vantage,” some alternative, some form of opposition to the “wholly pervasive.” In seeking to avoid the totalizing thesis of clashing civilizations, we would do well to heed Said’s advice
that the unevenness and heterogeneity of the territory that one is looking at has to be the main point of assertion. ... If you’re going to assume that there is some way of apprehending the whole of reality, then you’re simply enhancing this totalizing process. ... All of these systems that confirm themselves over and over again so that every shred of evidence becomes an instance of the system as a whole — these systems are really the enemies. (Hentzi and McClintock 11)
Notes
For insightful, yet critical, discussions of Said’s indebtedness to Adorno’s work, see Varadharajan and Dallmayr. |
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It should be noted, however, that Berque and Rodinson do not return the compliment and that they both accuse Said of advancing a conspiracy theory against Western scholars and of being an ill-informed interloper in the disciplinary field of Orientalist studies. For further discussion of their disciplinary defensiveness, see Marrouchi (especially 210-12). |
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Text of note number 3. |
Works Cited
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Ahmad, Aijaz. In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures. London: Verso, 1992.
Ashcroft, Bill. “Conversation with Edward Said.” New Literatures Review 32 (1996): 3-21.
Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000.
Clifford, James. “On Orientalism.” The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1988. 225-76.
Dallmayr, Fred. “The Politics of Nonidentity: Adorno, Postmodernism—and Edward Said.” Political Theory 25:1 (1997): 33-56.
Deane, Seamus. “Under Eastern and Western Eyes.” boundary 2 28:1 (2001): 1-18.
Gee, Marcus. “World Watch.” The Globe and Mail 1 Nov. 2001: A13.
Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso, 1993.
Hentzi, Gary and Anne McClintock. “An Interview with Edward W. Said.” Critical Texts 3:2 (1986): 6-13.
Jay, Martin. “The Debate Over Performative Contradiction: Habermas versus the Poststructuralists.” Philosophical Interventions in the Unfinished Project of Enlightenment. Eds. Axel Honneth et al. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 1992. 261-79.
Marrouchi, Mustapha. “Counternarratives, Recoveries, Refusals.” boundary 2 25:2 (1988): 205-57.
Moore-Gilbert, Bart. Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics. London: Verso, 1997.
Prakash, Gyan. “Orientalism Now.” History and Theory 34:3 (1995): 199-212.
Rose, Jacqueline. “Edward Said talks to Jacqueline Rose.” Critical Quarterly 40:1 (1998): 72-89.
Said, Edward W. Beginnings: Intention and Method. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1975.
—. Afterword to the 1995 Printing. Orientalism. London: Penguin, 1995. 329-54.
—. “The Clash of Definitions.” Reflections on Exile and other Essays. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 2000. 569-90.
—. “Collective Passion.” Al-Ahram Weekly Online 20-26 Sept. 2001. www.ahram.org.eg/weekly.
—. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Knopf, 1993.
—. “Humanism and Heroism.” MLA Presidential Address, 1999. PMLA 115:3 (2000): 285-91.
—. Orientalism. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978.
—. Out of Place: A Memoir. New York: Knopf, 1999.
—. “Traveling Theory.” The World, the Text, and the Critic. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1983. 226-47.
—. “Vico on the Discipline of Bodies and Texts.” MLN 91 (1976): 817-26.
Salusinszky, Imre. “Interview with Edward Said.” Criticism in Society. New York: Methuen, 1987.
Strong, Tracy B. and Frank Andrew Sposito. “Habermas’s Significant Other.” The Cambridge Companion to Habermas. Ed. Stephen K. White. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. 263-88.
Varadharajan, Asha. Exotic Parodies: Subjectivity in Adorno, Said, and Spivak. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1995.
Wicke, Jennifer and Michael Sprinker. “Interview with Edward Said.” Edward Said: A Critical Reader. Ed. Michael Sprinker. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992. 221-64.
Young, Robert. White Mythologies: Writing History and the West. London: Routledge, 1990.
