Edward Said about the Responsibilty of the Intellectual

Essay , 2015 , 8 Pages

American Studies - Literature

It is commonly observed that the intellectuals are increasingly withdrawing themselves from the world and retiring into the insular cells of academic exercise. But Edward Said feels that as intellectuals are the best brains of society, they should have a genuine interest in the order of things in society and the world. This article examines Said's arguments and stakes about the role and responsibility of the intellectual.
The present paper seeks to engage with certain crucial aspects of the Saidian formulations of and about the intellectuals. As an Arab Palestinian working as a professor of literature in an elite American institution, Said was fighting injustice and discrimination at all levels all through. This struggle against his overarching surroundings of power and politics also gets reflected in his deliberations on the role of the intellectuals in an increasingly globalized and conformist world.

Edward Said and the Responsibility of the Intellectual

The facts, figures and experience of the world have established beyond doubt the impossibility of any given society being perfect, in complete equilibrium. In fact, to use a term popularized by Prof Radhakrishnan, we live in an “uneven world.” This gives rise to the need for a sustained and engaged critique of politics, cultures, values and ideas. From time immeorial, intellectuals have been taking leading positions and roles in resisting dominations and countering hegemonic practices. However, in the contemporary world of ever increasing free market forces and consequent conformist values, intellectuals seem to be withdrawing from the world into the narrow alleys of textualities and narratologies, into de-contextualized specializations. Edward W. Said has been a constant and consistent critic of this trend, whose life and works strongly resent the “vanishing history” of committed, engaged intellectuals. He works and words constantly reiterate the need for ethical action on the part of the intellectuals. The present paper seeks to engage with certain crucial aspects of the Saidian formulations of and about the intellectuals. An Arab Palestinian working as a professor of literature in an elite American institution, Said was fighting injustice and discrimination at all levels all through. This struggle against his overarching surroundings of power and politics also gets reflected in his deliberations on the role of the intellectuals in an increasingly globalized and conformist world.

Readings from Said’s Representations of the Intellectual (1993) can bring to the fore his stakes and contentions concerning the role and responsibilities of the intellectuals. Said has been developing his idea of the imperatives of political action for the intellectual in his writings from 1967 onwards, which can be seen to get a concrete shape in the book. The fifth lecture of Said’s 1993 Reith Lectures entitled “Representations of the Intellectual” is concerned with “Speaking the Truth to Power.” For Said, this entails the intellectual’s ability to critique power and authoritarianism of all kinds at any cost. The dominant power discourse often misrepresents what is convenient to it as “the” truth. The intellectual, Said seems to suggest, has to unveil this politics of truth by countering the authoritarian version of truth with an egalitarian version of truth. This, Said feels, is necessarily a pragmatic position:

Speaking the truth to power is no Panglossian idealism: it is carefully weighing the alternatives, picking the right one, and then intelligently representing it where it can do the most good and cause the right change. (75)

Speaking truth to power, then, is also a matter of strategy along with conviction. Further, it is always aimed at bringing in “the right change.”

At the same time that the text reveals his understanding of contemporary thought—the poststructuralist assertions regarding the multiplicity or plurality of truth, Said ventures postulating “The Truth” which would counter oppressive power structures. The advocacy of truth as an agent of change by Said can be seen as his resistance to poststructuralism even as he uses its tenets. In fact, his attitude to poststructuralism can be best seen as an attitude of “ambivalence.” Interestingly, in his Edward Said and the Religious Effects of Culture (2000) , William D. Hart sees the ambivalence as “Said has always been something of a Trojan horse in the poststructuralist-postmodernist city” (116). However, the postulation is that truth and its modalities and implications are generated by specific context and not hypothetical. As Said sees it:

Is the intellectual galvanized into intellectual action by primordial, local, instinctive loyalties-one’s race, or people, or religion-or is there some more universal and rational set of principles that can and perhaps do govern how one speaks and writes? In effect I am asking the basic question for the intellectual: how does one speak the truth? What truth? For whom and where? (8)

The search for truth has always remained a critical concern for thinkers in the domains of religion, philosophy as well as social formulations. It has haunted thinkers as diverse as Plato, Bacon, Descartes, Heidegger and Derrida. In the contemporary European intellectual scenario, however, three prominent thinkers can be seen to have addressed the issue relatively more directly: Foucault, Chomsky and Said. Said’s insistence on the role of the intellectual can be seen as complementary to similar arguments in Chomsky. Similarly, Foucault in his analysis of power structures seems to be interrogating the power- knowledge complicity. As Said sees it, however, human beings live in a society that both belongs and sustain a nationality, language, tradition and historical situation. The intellectual can both serve and go against these situations and traditions. Said firmly believes that an intellectual must be committed to society, while at the same time being relatively independent of the presence of tradition.

The question as to whether intellectuals are a large or a minority community leads Said to refer to two points of view offered by two influential intellectuals, Antonio Gramsci and Julien Benda. The point of departure in Representation of the Intellectual is provided by a re-interpretation of the Gramscian intellectual. Said makes a distinction between Julien Benda and Antonio Gramsci in terms of their representations of the intellectual. Benda, for example, in The Treason of the Intellectual (1928), divides humanity into “clerks” and “layman.’’ While the laymen are “ordinary” men and women, the mass, the “clerks are intellectuals, who pursue art, science, or metaphysical speculation while disregarding practical, mundane, and worldly affairs” (Hart 118). Benda’s clerks, obviously, are originally Christian clerics given to sacred and at times secular academic pursuits, mostly devoid of material concerns. But according to Benda, towards the end of the nineteenth century they started showing political aspiration both as individuals and fraternity, an act that Benda reads as an act of treason or betrayal of their avowed vocations:

As soon as the “clerk” claims that he does not disregard the interests of the nation or of the established classes, he is inevitably beaten, for the very good reason that it is impossible to preach the spiritual and the universal without undermining the institutes whose foundations are the possessions of the material and the desire to feel distinct from others.

Again, A true “clerk” (Renan) says excellently: “The mother-country is a worldly thing; the man who wants to play the angel will always be a bad patriot.” To be strong , and to avoid transgressing his principles or undermining the institutes that he supports, the clerk must self-consciously declare his principles:

[...]

• Author: Dr. Jaydeep Chakrabarty (Author)
• Publication Year: 2015
• Pages: 8
• Catalog Number: V298445
• ISBN (eBook): 9783656969105
• ISBN (Book): 9783656969112
• Language: English
• Tags: edward, said, responsibilty, intellectual