Long Live Edward Said?
[Original Dutch article published on Sep 30, 2003; English version is due to google translate and some minor changes]
Edward Said is dead. Last Wednesday he lost his battle with cancer. The influence of this Palestinian writer in all areas of the social sciences of the last quarter century is immense. Many will remember him from Delhi to Dar Es Salaam, from Paris to Chicago; many will also write in memoriams.
As the author of a whole series of books and articles, it was mainly Orientalism, a book published in 1978, which garnered fame and criticism and brought him friends and enemies alike. How will we remember him? As someone who influenced the intellectual world for what it meant for a period and its achievements? Or will we remember him as he should be remembered, because of his challenges to us? What makes Edward Said an interesting and perhaps a tragic figure is that the answers to these two questions do not coincide.
Edward Said was a professor of English Literature, but what he wrote has contributed greatly to the political correctness of our time. The moral precepts that dictate how to speak and act correctly often determine what we think about: these precepts become the thought police of a generation. What do I mean?
A few weeks ago, in the TV program Nachtwacht, the following pearls of wisdom could be heard: “Islam does not exist, but there are many Islams”; “it is ‘essentialist’ to speak of Islam,” and so on. This was also Edward Said’s diagnosis in his Orientalism, which shed light on Western views of the Orient. In examining how the West has described Islam and the people of the Middle East, Said sought to argue that there is a tendency in Western culture to freeze Islam in a fundamental set of doctrines that remain unchanging through time.
The television program echoed similar thoughts when it was said that one should not “essentialize” and that Islam does not exist. But what is wrong with “essentialism”? How many kinds of “essentialism” exist? What is wrong with saying that water is “essentially” H2O and that liquids are not water if their chemical composition does not have the “essential” property of H2O? If Islam does not exist, how is it possible to talk about different Islams? What makes a particular religion one of the Islam, not one of the Christianities?
Or take another example. What exists on earth is a John, Peter, Paul, and so on. Can we say on these grounds that man does not exist, but that there are only individual human beings? If man doesn’t exist, what did Darwin do when he studied the origin of the species? There is currently a heated debate in the philosophy of biology about the units of selection: does selection take place at the level of the individual organism, or at the level of the group, or at the level of the genes? This debate will not be settled on the basis of political correctness. Why would it be different for Islam?
Another example is Said’s statement about “dichotomies.” He claims that much of the violence between people has to do with the distinction between “we” and “them”: between Europeans and Arabs, between East and West, and so on. This statement, which at first glance seems plausible, is part of the same political correctness. But what’s wrong with dichotomies or binary thinking? Our electrical connections are binary: they are either on or off; computers are in a binary state: 0 or 1; we evaluate statements in binary terms: true or false. What is wrong with this? Dichotomies are believed to indicate dualism in thought, which in turn is believed to be evil. But those who say this have not said what the alternative should be: monism, or something else? Is the trichotomy better than the dichotomy?
To get closer to home, consider many debates about migrants in Belgium. It is often said that there is only a Mohammed, an Ibrahim and an Abdullah, but no “migrant.” It must therefore be assumed that the legislative and judicial bodies of the Belgian state lose themselves in delusion when they formulate or interpret laws about migrants. Every time I cross the border with my Belgian passport, there is a miracle: since the Belgian does not exist, how can I cross the border because I am a Belgian?
Speaking about the migrant culture is viewing culture as a static and not a dynamic entity, the same people tell us. So should we accept that all scientists speak in static terms when they talk about the development of the child’s body during adolescence?
I can give an endless series of examples of similar silliness, but that’s not for now. Today it is important to realize that Edward Said has been instrumental in creating this generation of illiterate intellectuals. They are the opinion leaders. They are our thought police. They are numerous and their impact catastrophic. Many of them are professors at universities large and small, transforming our children into ignorant empty heads. This is Said’s contribution to his time. This is also the tragedy surrounding Said. Perhaps the believers among you will wish peace to his soul after all. As a heathen who has no knowledge of what a soul is or where it finds peace, I tend to think less generously about the death of this Edward Said.
But there is also another Edward Said, the Said I teach my students. This man turned our attention to a phenomenon that was hardly at issue before he exposed it. He made us aware of the fact that Western culture speaks in a very systematic and very specific way about other (non-Western) cultures. And that this phenomenon has a long history. This way of looking at other cultures should not be seen as an expression of racism, sexism, xenophobia or imperialism, it is a phenomenon of a different order.
Although racists and xenophobes have also often been orientalists (those who study the orient), not all orientalists are racists and xenophobes. Instead, one must identify the mechanisms by which Western culture has transformed all other cultures into variants of itself.
This Edward Said did uncover a phenomenon, but he couldn’t explain it. He gave an immense task to the future generations of intellectuals and social scientists: how can we explain that a certain culture is characterized by a characteristic way of speaking about other cultures despite historical changes, discontinuities, and revolutions? How can we determine whether the violent clash between Western culture and other cultures has anything to do with the way the West has distinguished itself from those other cultures? Are there other ways to distinguish cultures (after all, there are different cultures) that do not lead to violence, discrimination and domination?
In other words, this Edward Said emphasized the need to develop scientific knowledge that would also be deeply humanistic. The latter was important to him because he was a humanist. Nothing human was alien to him. Although he was neither a philosopher nor a social scientist, he brought to the fore issues that are fundamental to both philosophy and the social sciences. He delineated the task of at least two generations; he gave us some fascinating insights.
An example of this is his description of Orientalism. It should not be seen so much as a series of doctrines or dogmas, said Said, but rather as a limitation on human thinking. All human thinking is limited by culture, time, accumulated knowledge and by language. In other words, thinking is limited because it is human. But not all human thinking is orientalistic. Orientalism is a product of Western thinking. Western thinking is of course also human. But it goes without saying that not all thinking is Western. From that perspective, Orientalism is a specific kind of limitation on Western thinking: it is a cultural project. That insight allows us to investigate the relationship between Western culture and its thinking. It also allows us to conceptualize cultural differences in a non-oriental way.
This Said also died. This is the Said we should remember. An intellectual of the caliber of Said may be best remembered not for what he meant for a period, but for what he should have meant. If we do that, we can be sure that the future will remember it as it should: as an intellectual who was among the first to turn our attention to a phenomenon of exceptional scope. This Said will not die. We don’t have to sing any requiems for this Said.