Edward W. Said--Representations of the Intellectual

Chapter 1: Representations of the Intellectual

Said begins by differentiating between two competing definitions of the intellectual:

• Gramsci: organic intellectual vs. traditional intellectual. The organic rise in relation to classes and unlike traditional intellectuals, act in movement instead of upholding entrenched systems.
• Benda: intellectuals are rare geniuses who upend the status quo by "upholding eternal standards of truth and justice" (5).

"the intellectual is an individual with a specific public role in society that connot be reduced simply to being a faceless professional, a competent member of a class just going about his/her business. The central fact for me is, I think, that the intellectual is an individual endowed with a faculty for representing, embodying, articulating a message, a view, an attitude, philosophy or opinion to, as well as for, a public. And this role has an edge to it, and cannot be played without a sense of being someone whose place it is publicly to raise embarrassing questions, to confront orthodoxy and dogma (rather than produce them), to be someone who cannot easily be co-opted by governments or corporations, and whose raison d'etre is to represent all those people and issues that are routinely forgotten or swept under the rug. The intellectual does so on the basis of universal principles: that all human beings are entitled to expect decent standards of behavior concerning freedom and justice from worldly powers or nations" (11).

"There is no such thing as a private intellectual" (12). This connects to Arendt: action must be public by nature.

Intellectuals have a vocation for representing publicly. (13)

"intellectuals are representative, not just of some subterranean or larger social movement, but of a quite peculiar, even abrasive style of life and social performance that is uniquely theirs" (14).

(I wonder about the intellectual as vocation, as someone produced but yet apart, actively criticizing and provoking the thing they're no longer a part of.)

Said, in defining the intellectual as one who advances human freedom and knowledge, rebuffs Lyotard's position that the Grand Narratives of the modern era are dead. For Said, such a position is a mark of laziness/indifference that ignores continuing oppressive regimes.

The actions of the intellectual cannot be leaned in a how-to guide. They must be learned "as a concrete experience constantly threatened by modern life itself" (20). Intellectuals definitions are in the ACTIVITY (Arendt) "dependent on a kind of consciousness that is skeptical, engaged, unremittingly devoted to rational investigation and moral judgment; and this puts the individual on record and on the line. Knowing how to use language well and knowing when to intervene in language are two essential features of intellectual action" (20).

Said calls for intellectuals to engage in politics, which is inescapable. The intellectual is a product of his time and must react to the representations of politics and media. Intellectuals should unmask official narratives and provide alternate iterations

Chapter 2: Holding Nations and Traditions at Bay

Though intellectuals differ from region to region, language to language, country to country, there are some general notions of what an intellectual does.

Intellectuals are beholden to a language that they try to make their own. However, that language carries with it the status quo. If the intellectual is to represent the editorial "we" and "us," if they are to put forth the best ideas of the collective conscious--perhaps even as a way to mitigate the mob rule of democracy--there's a danger in becoming co-opted mouthpieces for the state, the nation, and nationalism. (30). Intellectuals should transcend such national mentalities, but in doing so, the intellectual is bound to a shared or common language that intimates national identity.

"Never solidarity before action." The intellectual will always have to choose between the stronger or the weaker (32-33). The intellectual should reveal the construct that is a national identity.

The intellectual will always face a problem of loyalty since they cannot disenfranchise themselves with their origins and membership in some group. The task then is not to criticize or simply add a voice to a revolutionary cause, but to create something new (Arendt). Their role is "to go beyond survival to questions of political liberation, to critiques of the leadership, to presenting alternatives that are too often marginalized or pushed aside as irrelevant to the main battle at hand" (41).

"For the intellectual the task...is explicitly to universalize the crisis, to give greater human scope to what a particular race or nation suffered, to associate that experience with the suffering of others...This does not at all mean a loss in historical specificity, but rather it guards against the possibility that a lesson learned about oppression in one place will be forgotten or violated in another place or time...you are not relieved of the duty of revealing that your own people now may be visiting related crimes on their victims" (44).

Chapter 3: Intellectual Exile: Expatriates and Marginals

Said begins this chapter talking about exiles and how they occupy an in-between space. They are not completely severed from their old place because they're constantly reminded that they're in exile. The old place exists, and the new place serves as a contrasting point for that fact.

This chapter focuses on the intellectual who will not acculturate. Intellectual exile is a metaphor, as well as a literal reference, for Said. Exiled intellectuals are outsiders. Exiled intellectuals are happy in their unhappiness, taking pleasure from their disdain.

"there is no real escape, even for the exile who tries to remain suspended, since that state of inbetweenness can itself become a rigid ideological position, a sort of dwelling whose falseness is covered over in time, and to which one can all too easily become accustomed" (58).

The exile never sees things in isolation. They don't see things as they are, but how they have come to be. The exile can look upon entrenched institutions with respect void of reverence. For the exile, such establishments reveal themselves more easily as products of history, in flux and changing. Therefore, the intellectual exile is ironic, skeptical, and playful, but not cynical. (61).

Exile can therefore be a model of thinking for the intellectual, a person who occupies the margins and is home-less. Such a position allows the intellectual to proceed in his affairs without caution or restraint for those in the corporate body.

Chapter 4: Professionals and Amateurs

Individuals associated with institutions rise and fall along with the institution. Said asks whether or not there can be a free-range intellectual, an intellectual apart from a university, a party, a union, etc.

The 20th century has seen a rise in the intelligentsia, which makes Said wonder whether or not an independent intellectual is even possible at all or if these intellectuals are in fact Gramscian organic intellectuals created by the class/interest they represent.

Said focuses his response to Joacoby's Reagan era publication about the demise of the non-institutional intellectual and its replacement with inarticulate, discipline-centered
 erudite professors.

Said proclaims that institutional affiliation does not keep one from being an intellectual. The threat to intellectualism today, for Said, is not institutionally related. Rather, it is PROFESSIONALISM.

Professionalism: "thinking of your work as an intellectual as something you do for a living, between the hours of nine and five with one eye on the clock, and another cocked at what is considered to be proper, professional behavior--not rocking the boat, not straying outside the accepted paradigms or limits, making yourself marketable and above all presentable, hence uncontroversial and unpolitical and 'objective'" (74).

Reading Sartre, Said says the modern criticism of the intellectual fails to consider how the intellectual is created in response to a society and the pressures that come along with society trying to cajole, hem in, and hector the intellectual.

There are four pressures that challenge the intellectual's ingenuity and will, which can only be overcome by "amateurism," being moved by passion and interest and refusing to be tied down to specialty (76).

Pressure #1: Specialization

• Usually accompanying high levels of education, specialization makes the intellectual lose sight of anything outside their field.
• Specialization causes the intellectual to tame their pursuits to fit what others will allow.
• It kills excitement and creates laziness

Pressure #2: Expertise

• comes from proper certification by an authority
• authorities instruct what type of language is to be used
• has little to do with knowledge

Pressure #3 & #4: Power and authority

• Professionalism breeds the coopting of intellectuals by powerful entities (e.g. STEM fields and the humanities in fighting communism during the Cold War) 
• large institutions "employ academic experts to carry out research and study programs that further commercial as well as political agendas. This of course is part of what is considered normal behavior in a free market system...Everything about the system is acceptable according to the standards of competition and market response that govern behavior under advanced capitalism in a liberal and democratic society...we have not been as fastidious in considering the threats to the individual intellectual of a system that rewards intellectual conformity...accordingly, research and accreditation are controlled in order to get and keep a larger share of the market" (81-82).

Intellectuals, especially those in academic settings should "be a thinking and concerned member of society...entitled to raise moral issues at the heart of even the most technical and professionalized activity as it involves one's country, its power, its mode of interacting" (82-82).

The role of the intellectual is not to placate or appease his audience.

Chapter 5: Speaking Truth to Power

This chapter focuses on how the intellectual confronts power and authority.

"the intellectual, properly speaking, is not a functionary or an employee completely given up to the policy goals of a government or a large corporation, or even  guild of like-minded professionals" (86).
Said claims that the intellectual shouldn't be bound by his professional training. But in engaging in areas outside expertise in the public sphere, the intellectual must ask: how does one speak the truth? What truth? For whom and where?

Said cautions and admonishes intellectuals whose objectivity doesn't bend to encompass the "them"/other. "the meaning of an effective intervention in that realm has to rest on the intellectual's unbudgeable conviction in a concept of justice and fairness that allows for differences between nations and individuals, without at the same time assigning them to hidden hierarchies, preferences, evaluations" (94).

"whereas we are right to bewail the disappearance of consensus on what constitutes objectivity, we are not by the same token completely adrift in self-indulgent subjectivity. Taking refuge inside a profession or nationality...is only taking refuge; it is not answer to the goads all of us receive just by reading the morning's news" (98).

"The intellectual does not climb a mountain or pulpit and declaim from the heights...the intellectual's voice is lonely, but it has resonance only because it associates itself freely with the reality of a movement, the aspirations of a people, the common pursuit of a shared ideal" (101-102).

"Speaking truth to power...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" (102).

Chapter 6: Gods That Always Fail

How far should an intellectual go in getting involved?

***Class Notes***

• 1800-1900 Britain colonized 84% of the world.
• They imposed political apparatuses when they colonized, and they also instilled cultural values: language, education, festivals, religion, etc.
• The cultural work did ask much if not more than the political work of colonizing
• Said is interested in the cultural colonizing. Language and education have as much colonizing force as political colonization
• Anti-colonist thinkers had a double-consciousness. They received its power but were also critical of it. They identified with it and felt subjugated by it. 
• 1950s+ many former colonies emerge as nation states, but the problems don't go away. Therefore, people like Said examine the lasting intellectual/cultural colonization that lingers. 
• e.g. Said and Spivak

• Said was particularly interested in how psychology worked on the colonized and the colonizer 
• Our subjectivities are fraught between dialectic between imposing power and not imposing power
• Said is most famous for his book Orientalism: an examination of how oriental people were represented to non-orientals often by people who never went there in the first place. It comes to stand in for the real, or as Foucault would say, it has become the real. Dual ontology: invented and real. 
• One of the first to talk about travel theory: how ideas move between different communities and different people and what changes in that movement. 
• Very active in the Israeli-Palestinian conversation. 
• Primary critique: he gives the European vision of the dominated group from the view of the dominator. It lacks a first person account. The repressed don't represent themselves; they need representation.

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