Adversarial saints
Robert Irwin says some amusing things in this interview with Scott McLemee about Irwin’s book on Said’s Orientalism. Scott asked what made a criticism of Orientalism seem worthwhile or necessary enough for a book.
I got irritated by the way some people in Eng Lit departments seemed to regard themselves as adversarial saints, robed in white and “speaking truth to power” because they read Conrad, Austen and Flaubert in strange ways. Whereas academics who read Masudi, Tabari and Ibn Khaldun were necessarily robed in black.
Yep. The adversarial sainthood thing is a big – a huge – part of why descriptions of postmodernism by fans of postmodernism tend to be so irritating. The reek of self-imputed adversarial sainthood is all over them. The very ‘notion that no one view, theory or understanding should be privileged over another (or that no discourse should be silenced)’ is a classic adversarial sainthood notion. The very notion that the word ‘privilege’ is relevant in an epistemic context is puglistic sainthood, as is the notion that saying a theory is wrong is ‘silencing’. That substitution of political attitudes for analysis and evaluation is pure sainthood stuff. Sympathy for the poor downtrodden abused rejected Wrong Bad Stupid ideas. Never mind the boring old proles, who cares if their unions are busted and their wages slashed and their jobs sent to the Mariana Islands, the pomo saints are still valiantly defending Wrong Bad Stupid ideas. Yay.
The annoying thing about Said was that he wanted a debate based on false factual premises. Of course, there are vested interests in scholarship, but, for God’s sake, if one is looking at vested interests in in Arabic and Islamic studies, most of the ‘vesting’ comes from Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States and Brunei with the establishments of chairs and lectureships which are implicitly circumscribed in what kinds of research they can initiate and publish. Above all, it is a great waste of time attacking British, French, American US and Israeli scholars of Arab and Islamic culture. The people who should be attacked are Senators, MPs, Israeli generals, arms merchants, media hacks, etc. The academic dog fight is a fantastic diversion from the real horrors of what is happening in the Gaza Strip, the Left Bank and Lebanon. If one is serious about politics, the Orientalism debate is an intellectual substitute for engaging with real, non-academic issues.
Well…yeah, but how else are academics going to get to feel like adversarial saints? Have a heart, Professor Irwin.
The earliest reviewers were mostly people who knew a lot about the actual state of the field. The enthusiasts who came later did not know the field and were mostly too lazy to check Said’s assertions. The book, by “speaking truth to power,” appeals to the adversarial mentality so common among students and radical lecturers. Bashing Orientalism has seemed to be a natural intellectual accessory to opposing Israeli policies on the West Bank and Gaza Strip, American imperialism and British racism. It is much easier deliver patronizing lectures or essays about old-fashioned Orientalists than it is to actually do anything useful for Palestine…As to whom my book may be useful to, Bishop Joseph Butler in the 18th century made the following observation: “Things and their actions are what they are and the consequences of them will be what they will be: why then should we wish to be deceived?”
Because that’s how we get to feel like adversarial saints.
But what happens to these idiots when they are so far out that they are not even wrong, to borrow Enrico Fermi’s phrase?
Presumably they then go off and become real saints like the menatlly-deformed Albanian dwarf in Calcutta …..
Never mind the boring old proles,
I used to joke with a friend that post modernism was actually an invention of the CIA/FBI deliberately designed to confuse progressive causes and tie up left leaning academics in knots as opposed to getting out there doing Good Things ™.
Unfortunately it seems to be a fraud some sections of academia have foisted on themselves, and the rest of us. If only we could unmask Foucault as having been put among us by the likes of J. Edgar Hoover.
Hey ho.
>But what happens to these idiots when they are so far out that they are not even wrong, to borrow Enrico Fermi’s phrase?< Far be it from me to correct Thingy Tingey (what *is* his/her first name – any suggestions anyone?), but I do believe that was Wolfgang Pauli.
>I used to joke with a friend that post modernism was actually an invention of the CIA/FBI deliberately designed to confuse progressive causes and tie up left leaning academics in knots as opposed to getting out there doing Good Things ™.< You really shouldn’t have posted that on the ‘net. It will be making the rounds of the conspiracy theory websites in hours as a serious theory. And Mohamed Fayed will note your reference to the FBI and include them as partners in the MI6/French intelligence services/US intelligence services/Royal family plot to hypnotise Princess Diana into not putting on her safety belt on that fateful night, when her dreams of happiness with Dodi and their forthcoming baby were dashed by a wicked scheme that used a Fiat Uno to intercept a speeding Mercedes.
Well you know how it is with these plots, they do all join up underneath somewhere. The Jews, the Masons, Einstein, Bertha Mason, Prince Phil, the Cubans, the Mafia, the Elders of Zion, Mason jars – they’re all in it somehow.
And don’t forget the Cathars and Templars! Manichean crusading postmodernism.
There’s a book for Dan Brown in this somewhere.
I do think that one key difference between Foucault and Derrida is that the former would have been horrified to see what goes on in his name, whereas the latter, until his recent demise, relished it.
Just to return briefly to the topic at hand I e-mailed Scott to say that Irwin’s criticisms of Said reminded me of Eagleton’s criticisms of Dawkins for not having read various obscure theologians. They are both true and totally irrelevant to the work in question.
“We must speak out – Today we are launching an appeal for a world-wide cultural boycott against the Israeli state. Today I am supporting a world-wide appeal to teachers, intellectuals and artists to join the cultural boycott of the state of Israel”
John Berger 15/12/2006
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/john_berger/2006/12/john_berger.html
More academic
… adversarials ?
(Damn server )
Final proof: The Independent really has ceased to be a newspaper to be taken seriously. I thought it was just one columnist’s aberration when on 12 December they published an article by Mary Dejevsky headed “I’m with the conspiracy theorists on Diana’s death” and starting with “Too many people have tried too hard to convince us for us to accept it was an accident.”
But today’s Independent *Leader* joins the conspiracy nuts: “…there remains enough doubt for rational people to feel uncomfortable. According to a recent poll, a third of the British public believe what happened to Diana was not an accident. This cannot be written off as a fringe belief…
“Many have dismissed the activities of Mohamed al-Fayed over the past decade as those of a father driven out of his mind by grief for his son, Dodi. Lord Stevens hinted at this again yesterday. No doubt the bereaved father is still grieving. But that does not make him deluded.”
Whoever wrote that last sentence is a deluded idiot. Fayed is a fantasist who makes up stories as he goes along, and of whom the 1990 DTI Inspectors’ report on the Fayed brothers’ acquisition of the House of Fraser said:
“As month after month of our investigation went by we uncovered more cases where the Fayeds were plainly telling us lies… In consequence of watching them give evidence we became reluctant to believe anything they told us unless it was reliably corroborated by independent evidence of a dependable nature…
“We regret that after all the care we had taken to protect ourselves against reliance on evidence from a single source, we found [the Fayeds’] submission to be both sad and ludicrous.”
On 13 December a letter in the Indie in response to Dejevsky asked:
“Perhaps Mary Dejevsky could answer just one question. If, like her bodyguard, Princess Diana had been wearing a seat belt she would still be alive – how did the supra-national conspiracy prevent her from putting it on during that fatal journey?
But on 14 December another correspondent put the classic argument that absence of evidence itself points to a conspiracy:
“MI6 and those involved in intelligence would cover every conceivable doubt for one very simple reason: even the slightest hint that they were in any way involved would destroy the whole edifice of British security and the establishment.”
Irwin’s criticisms of Said reminded me of Eagleton’s criticisms of Dawkins for not having read various obscure theologians. They are both true and totally irrelevant to the work in question.
Hang on there, surely it is Said’s criticisms of Orientalism that are like Eagleton’s crit of Dawkins. Both are making complex arguments on false fundamental premises. Eagleton’s is theology based on the false premise of God, Said’s is post modern deconstruction on the false premise of a monolithic school or orientalism. Irwin was pointing this out.
Yeah, as far as I know it’s Said who was doing the Eagelton thing. See Ibn Warraq’s article on Said right here at B&W –
http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/articleprint.php?num=23
Allen Esterson writes:
But today’s Independent *Leader* joins the conspiracy nuts…
Un-forking-credible. This is the scoop of the millennium. Indeed I’m amazed there hasn’t already been a slew of replies to your posting – I myself have just come across it, but I’ll be brief because I am about to head out the door and won’t be back until Monday.
I’m still saying to myself: this must be a hoax. Write it down 50 times: this must be a hoax, this must be a hoax, this must be a hoax … like that Orson Welles ‘War of the Worlds’ broadcast in 1938. Or the spoof about the secession of Flanders on Belgian French TV last Wednesday.
Sure you’re not hallucinating, Allen? Tell us what you’ve been smoking. Must be great stuff. Who’s wearing the tinfoil hat, you or they?
*********************
I’m looking forward to the upcoming debate in ‘The Independent’:
Diana’s death — LIHOP or MIHOP?
LIHOP = Let It Happen On Purpose
MIHOP = Make It Happen On Purpose.
As in 9/11.
As in the grassy knoll.
As in the Protocols.
If you ask me it was the Pope dunit.
Re: Berger’s boycott. This is sadly disappointing, since I’ve always rather liked Berger’s work. Oh well. This year does seem to be the year for animosity against the occupation to take shape as antipathy to intellectuals and artists. As if those intellectuals and artists are responsible for public policy…or perhaps this is just another manifestation of the academic delusion that intellectuals DO have a hand in shaping public policy.
Here’s an interesting response to Berger:
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/michael_berkeley/2006/12/john_berger_is_wrong_to_boycot.html
Just one point about the Michael Berkeley article: “while we at home banned performances of Beethoven because it was ‘enemy music’.”
Like one of the first commentators to the article, I have not only never heard that (and as an oldie I was growing into my early teens just after the war), I know Myra Hess regularly played Beethoven in recitals at (I think) the National Portrait Gallery – it was certainly at Trafalgar Square. I think this is an example of a tendency of bien pensant types to assume that the worst about one’s own country (just to show that they are not nationalistic). Berkeley is confusing World War 2 with World War 1.
That should have been the National Gallery at Trafalgar Square!
Dave wrote:
>I do think that one key difference between Foucault and Derrida is that the former would have been horrified to see what goes on in his name, whereas the latter, until his recent demise, relished it.< No doubt, as with all writers who have gained a wide audience, Foucault has been misrepresented. But what he actually wrote should suffice to horrify! Take that debate between Foucault and Chomsky: http://www.chomsky.info/debates/1971xxxx.htm
As someone said somewhere on the internet, Foucault makes Chomsky seem like a moderate:
Sample: “When the proletariat takes power, it may be quite possible that the proletariat will exert towards the classes over which it has just triumphed, a violent, dictatorial and even bloody power. I can’t see what objection one could make to this.”
Such insight!
Foucault’s history wasn’t exactly meticulously researched, either, with broad rhetorical flourishes that impress the uncritical mind taking the place of genuine scholarship. A characteristic example will suffice. In *Madness and Civilisation* he gave an account of the “Ship of Fools” that supposedly carried insane people in the Middle Ages from port to port. This story had absolutely no basis in documentable fact, but, hey, who cares? It performed the required function of providing ‘support’ for his general thesis.
To be contradicted by BJN and OB makes me feel I’ve finally made it as a B&W correspondent.
What I was trying to suggest was that (according to Scott’s description – I’ve not read the book but intend to do so)Irwin provides tremendous amounts of detail about both well-known and obscure students of ‘Oriental’ cultures and appears to believe that the existence of this work undermines Said’s proposals on ‘Orientalism’.
I don’t see why this is so, and pulled in the Eagleton example as something I thought was a similar tactic i.e.raising all kinds of objections to a position that the original writer never intended to take.
Having said that, I agree that the counter-position taken by BJN and OB is valid.
I’ll get me coat…
Woot! That means I’ve also made it if someone thinks they’ve made it because I disagree with them. Here I was think I was simply an irregular poster of low repute.
‘Orientalism’ is the study of near eastern cultures. So any comment on it has to based on the analysis of oriental scholars. For Said’s proposals on Orientalism to be valid they have to be based on ‘true’ (love that word) facts about Oriental scholarship. In your own words, this means going into “detail about both well-known and obscure students of ‘Oriental’ cultures“.
From my reading of the Scott interview, Irwin believes that Said did no such thing, Said’s knowledge was wrong, and his reasoning from it worse.
That “detail” is the heart of the matter, not a peripheral issue, it is what the argument is all about.
“When the proletariat takes power, it may be quite possible that the proletariat will exert towards the classes over which it has just triumphed, a violent, dictatorial and even bloody power. I can’t see what objection one could make to this.”
Quite a common point of view in 1971, and on the face of it, an entirely reasonable conjecture. Violent, dictatorial and even bloody power is, after all, what all states have exercised, historically, and what the whole broad Marxist tradition asserted was exercised by the ‘bourgeoisie’ in the modern era. Even Nelson Mandela was engaged in violent struggle before he turned into a secular saint.
I didn’t say F. was right about anything, but his followers have made far more of a hash of it than he ever did — indeed he was always notable for his evolving perspective and would not have wanted to have become a ‘method’.
Foucault: “When the proletariat takes power…[etc]”
Dave: “Quite a common point of view in 1971, and on the face of it, an entirely reasonable conjecture.”
“The proletariate takes power” is an utterly meaningless statement entertained by people who live in a world of abstract entities, rather than one of real-life flesh-and-blood human beings.
And, Dave, you forgot to comment on Foucault’s saying of “a violent, dictatorial and even bloody power” exercised by “the proletariate” [snigger], “I can’t see what objection one could make to this.” Do I take it that you think that is also “entirely reasonable”?
Sorry about the misspelling of “proletariat”. Anyway, as I was saying…
Dave: “Violent, dictatorial and even bloody power is, after all, what all states have exercised, historically, and what the whole broad Marxist tradition asserted was exercised by the ‘bourgeoisie’ in the modern era.”
“Modern era”, eh? So the Britain of Lloyd George, Atlee, Macmillan, Wilson, Heath, and the Scandinavian countries and so on, were not *essentially* different in terms of their power structure than the State terror of Leninist or Stalinist USSR or Hitlerite Germany? And you think that is “entirely reasonable” just because it was asserted by “the whole broad Marxist tradition”?
[Sound of key being turned, chk, chk, chk]
In 1971 a very large portion of the politically active population believed that kind of thing, maybe you think they were all nuts, but that’s your privilege… It’s certainly nothing to single out Foucault for…
It reminds me that George Orwell, a secular saint these days, thought much the same thing about ‘come the revolution’ — indeed he positively anticipated it, whereas F is just commenting on the possibility.
Dave: “In 1971 a very large portion of the politically active population believed that kind of thing, maybe you think they were all nuts, but that’s your privilege… It’s certainly nothing to single out Foucault for…”
The idea that “a very large proportion of the politically active population” (even keeping to left-of-centre politics) had their minds in the straitjacket of such crude conceptual schema indicates a greatly exaggerated idea of the importance of people like the New Left Review crowd and the various Trotskyist fringe groups.
Here’s Foucault again in the same debate:
“It is only too clear that we are living under a regime of a dictatorship of class, of a power of class which imposes itself by violence, even when the instruments of this violence are institutional and constitutional; and to that degree, there isn’t any question of democracy for us.”
So most of those many thousands of politically active Labour Party supporters (let’s leave out the politically active supporters of the other two main parties, apparently they don’t count) believed this kind of simplistic ideological construct? It’s rather like members of the Women’s Institute thinking that jam-making was a regular activity of most women who took an active part in voluntary organisations – except that there were far more members of the Women’s Institute than of the groups who thought in such terms.
Dave: “It reminds me that George Orwell, a secular saint these days, thought much the same thing about ‘come the revolution’ — indeed he positively anticipated it, whereas F is just commenting on the possibility.”
From this it seems you haven’t grasped that what I’ve been saying has little to do with Foucault’s commenting on the possibility of violent revolution, and everything to do with the language he uses, and the conceptual schema implicit in such language.
The notion that George Orwell “thought much the same thing” about the potential for Marxist-style revolution in the UK is bizarre. My take on his writings is that he thought that the British working class had too much basic commonsense to be influenced by the abstract ideological ruminations of so many on the intellectual far Left.
>May’68 anyone? A lot of bonkers students on the one hand, but also a general strike by ten million workers. Silly sods one and all no doubt, but ten million silly sods nonetheless…< What on earth has that got to do with the kind of political conceptual schema we’re discussing? In any case, since when have numbers holding a belief been a measure of whether it is sensible? And the allusion to May ’68 (the significance of which has been absurdly exaggerated by those who dream of the overthrow of capitalism by revolutionary action) implies that most of the students held such crude views. (Mind you, being French students, taught by French academics and intellectuals, means that many of them possibly *did* believe such stuff. After all, amazingly, Lacanians are a major force not only in French Freudian circles, but in the French psychiatric profession as well. If the French educated classes can fall for that charlatan in large numbers, they can fall for anything.) >Oh, and when one is talking, sometimes one simplifies to make a point, don’t you find?< The idea that Foucault was “simplifying to make a point” with the kind of conceptions I’ve quoted verges on the ridiculous. Foucault was simplifying his argument in a debate with *Chomsky*? Honestly! In any case if you read the debate you’ll see that Chomsky makes plain that *he* couldn’t go along with Foucault’s intellectual crudities. Anyway, if he *had* been presenting his views in such terms to “make a point” it would have been counterproductive. Anyone with any sort of socio-political nous whose head wasn’t stuffed with ideological constructs would be repelled by such crude conceptualisations.
I don’t find Foucault’s comments all that shocking, coming from a young academic in 1971. Come on. You were either a Maoist, Hoxhaite, Trotskyite or with Baader-Meinhoff. The position he is defending against Chomsky is pretty bad, I agree, but if his Marxist boilerplate is taken as disqualifying him totally intellectually, a whole generation of academics should be treated in the same manner. If I recall, I made pretty much the same points back in 1996. I had less of an excuse.
Aside from this, I would venture Foucault’s statement: “I can’t see what objection one could make to this” relates to the whole preceding proposition of the proletariat taking power, exercising it bloodily, etc. rather than the bloodiness of said power. Foucault is granting Chomsky a point, and then argues (dubiously) that the dictatorship of the proletariat will not be directed against itself, so in the (mistaken) instrumental kind of justification Foucault handles, it will be all right.
Allen. Yes, the factionalism on an already minimal far left rendered it impotent in terms of the realpolitik, which is why some academic journals and Eng Lit departments, etc. were targetted – it was a battle they could win.
Horrible cynic that I am (perhaps because I read Malcolm Bradbury’s The History Man when I was an impressionable sixteen year old), I too have a nagging worry that there is an amount of opportunistic charlatanism going on. What an awful thing for me to say. The humanities depts really do strike me as a closed shop in some Unis… unhealthy
>Horrible cynic that I am (perhaps because I read Malcolm Bradbury’s The History Man when I was an impressionable sixteen year old), I too have a nagging worry that there is an amount of opportunistic charlatanism going on. What an awful thing for me to say. < It’s worse than that, Nick. I strongly suspect these guys really believe in the stuff they propagate to their students and like-minded academics.
Allen:
I don’t think the kind of dogmatic boilerplate Foucault is defending in the Chomsky discussion is “reasonable” at all. As I made clear. I’m just pointing out that, in ’71, such ideas were rather widespread among students and academics, and that I do not believe that this disqualified the sum total of Foucault’s intellectual production (while keeping the possibility open that said production may be disqualified for other reasons – I don’t know, haven’t read much Foucault).
But I think my reading of the sentence: “I can’t see what objection one could make to this” is the intended one. It is certainly not absolutely clear to me that yours, which seems extremely uncharitable to me, is to be preferred.
Merlijn: This isn’t really worth taking much further, but I’m bemused by your response (and I really don’t see where charitable or uncharitable comes into it). Here is the crux of what he said:
FOUCAULT:
When the proletariat takes power, it may be quite possible that the proletariat will exert towards the classes over which it has just triumphed, a violent, dictatorial and even bloody power. I can’t see what objection one could make to this. […]
If Foucault is not saying that he can’t see what objection one can make to this, i.e., to the possible violent, even bloody, exercise of power by “the proletariat”, what on earth is he saying? Chomsky clearly takes it that way, as he writes of what Foucault has just said that “the theory [just propounded by Foucault] maintains that it is proper for the proletariat to take power and exercise it in a violent and bloody and unjust fashion…”
But my original point was not the potential taking of power, but about the *conceptual language* that I argued bears little relationship to anything in the real world of flesh and blood humans in society. No one has yet come up with the meaning of the statement “when the proletariat takes power”.
Merlijn:
>…while keeping the possibility open that said production may be disqualified for other reasons – I don’t know, haven’t read much Foucault.< I’ve *started* to read some of Foucault’s books, but have given up on them pretty quickly. As I wrote before, he is one for the big rhetorical flourish, which I’m sure exhilarates those who like his message, but which I find tiresome because I’m always wanting to know what is the *evidence* for that assertion – not the kind of thing you find too much of in Foucault as far as can see, you’re expect to take the great man on trust. For instance, his claim of a silencing of the mentally disordered by a Europe-wide “great confinement” at the end of the seventeenth century has been challenged (e.g. by the medical historian Roy Porter who said nothing like it happened outside France, and certainly not in England). Checking Wikipedia I see one contributor writes: “Foucault has also been criticised for his use of historical information, with claims that he frequently misrepresented things, got his facts wrong, extrapolated from insufficient data, or simply made them up entirely.” Apart from that, although he was by no means a follower of Freud, he seems to accept Freudian concepts as if they had been clinically proven to exist, e.g, the Oedipus complex. In his *Maelzel’s Chess Player*, Robert Wilcocks gives a quote from Foucault in which he takes as given certain notions of Freud’s and writes that the passage is “alas, typical of Foucault’s unreliability as a serious historian once he has spurred his hobbyhorse into a gallop.” In other words, when in full flight on one of his grandiose generalisations fact, fiction, myth is all grist for his mill.