“Moreover, the persistence of the poetics of entanglement in these discourses suggests the possibility of an anthropological position, a position which attempts to identify how metaphors gain semantic valence according to worldly relationships, a position which may remain meaningful so long as these worldly relationships are shared among human bodies–even as those bodies become stretched in various cultural directions.”
As one hears that last phrase, “even as those bodies become stretched in various cultural directions,” there arises one more aspect of stricture to address, a bodily one. What is the body’s capacity to stretch, anyway? Is this plasticity, this sense of muscle fibers stretching and contracting, at play in Levinas’s claim that the Gordean knot does not abstractly represent one’s relationship to others in time, but is located in one’s very flesh? “[T]he Gordean knot of the body, the extremities in which it begins or ends, are forever dissimulated in the knot that cannot be undone, and that commands in the ungraspable noesis its own transcendental origin.”
Maybe we could understand Levinas’s statement by answering Derrida’s question: “Shall we associate fidelity with reliability?” If we have already remarked that knottiness is the stickiness of substance, then it might be due for us to talk about the relationship between knots and an experience of consistency. To understand consistency we might want to remember that “it is this diachrony–this diachrony that refuses simultaneity, this knot that refuses to be undone–which gives one access to transcendence, by means of a continuity, a trace”–so that consistency is what things are made of, for a time. And that key, “for a time”, comes to explain why Derrida associates Verlasslichkeit, reliability, with fidelity, and why “[f]aithful is that on which, the one on whom, one can also count.”
Derrida explains that for Heidegger’s German term, Verlasslichkeit, “[r]eliability is a more or less strict, more or less loose approximation.” Derrida explains how he came to this translation through, “[t]he French translator of Holzwege [Heidegger’s book]”, who “proposes a word which is both unacceptable and yet pertinent”: “solidity.” The solidity of the object, its consistency, its lack of dissipation, “here of the shoes,” is fitting “because one can ‘have confidence in them,’ says a translator’s footnote; the shoe ‘will not slip off,’ ‘one can put one’s weight’ on it.” Derrida then notes that the common notion of solidity as durability and toughness–“in common usage, the solidity of a product comes above all from its qualities of physical resistance, the resistance of the materials from which it is made, the resistance of its forms to wearing out”–seems to be entirely different from “[t]he idea of confidence, of credit, of faith, or of reliability”. But Derrida understands the link when the translator combines “soldered” for gewiss with “solidity” for Verlasslichkeit, so that the translator “restitutes strangely a movement that is legible in the text”.
Durability and resistance are conceptually linked to cohesion: “[t]he chain which links solid to solidarity and to solder is indeed that of tightening up…” And the idea of things being cohesive, fitting together, “would be the tightening of this originary ring, such the effect of Verlasslichkeit“. It would therefore become possible to do away with the notion of truth as mimetic adequation, because Verlasslichkeit would be able to function in ways where adequation had been needed: “[e]verything that one might then seek to adjust to measure, ‘to the right size,’ in terms of adequation, of reappropriation, of reattribution, of identification, of readaptation of the part to the whole, of symbolic reattachment, of restitution, etc….would primarily bank on such a reliability.” In the reference to reliability as a “ring”, Derrida seems to have in mind marriage, a kind of faithfulness where one can trust that one’s partner can leave and always return. The pattern of departure and return itself forms a circle, a ring; the Truth in Painting closes with this cycle: “It’s gone. It’s coming round again. It’s just gone again.”
There is also an internal bodily experience at play, a way that the very physicality of one’s body is responsible for generating consistency, reliability. The routine rhythms of the body, undisturbed, might explain why Derrida writes that “[f]aithful is that on which, the one on whom, one can also count. [emphasis mine]” In other words, I am imagining the way that a remarkably unspoken and proximate experience of the body is at play, much like auto-affection, in the way that one silently counts to oneself.
And, saying that this internal counting is a kind of faith, we might imagine it to be prayerful. Which returns us to “Levinas’s claim that ‘[t]he interpretations of the discourse found again and recounted [emphasis mine] in the immanence of the said are conserved like the knots in a thread tied again, the trace of a diachrony that does not enter into the present, that refuses simultaneity.’ I can imagine, as Levinas seems to, a person tying knots, lost in thought, absent-mindedly braiding, with only the number of knots as proof of the passage of time. These knots, while they serve as a measure of time’s passing, cannot offer the weaver any capacity to return to lost thought, thereby forming ‘the trace of a diachrony that does not enter into the present’.”
There is a “covered up” bodily movement that makes consciousness and communication possible. Unable to disclose these internal relations or gain control over them, we must remain in a kind of prayerful relation to the world. Thinking of how these unobserved movements of the body generate every accurate account of the world, we might come to understand why Derrida has written his four essays on painting “[f]our times around color, too, which is thought to be extraneous to the trait, as if chromatic difference did not count. [emphasis mine]”
And why is that emphasis on counting so important? Well, Derrida had initially written that number was simply a matter of the cut, of separation; the cut is intrinsic to the mind’s ability to hold a certain number of things as different instantiations of the same category. But how is this cut composed, really? Is it not that there must be some visual difference which occurs, and which thereby allows me to differentiate one thing from another–a color chasm, a “chromatic difference” that creates this cut or separation? And so we might understand the cut of separation as being created by an even more primordial trace of color, a grade in a shade.
We might further understand how this perception of color is more primordial, if we imagine that this chromatic capacity extends also to those entities that are not cut, if we try to understand how the perception of color guides the movement of every visual perception or act of reading. “When I have myself taken the time to observe and admire paintings by Van Gogh, I am always put at ease by the way in which my eyes will, for the next minute or so, know precisely where to go. The curl of an iris’ petal leads, through the shape of its bend and the grade in its shade, precisely to the next, which twists, with equal grace, so that my eyes give thanks, to the next.”
We might want to also remember how, in Speech and Phenomenon, Derrida makes use, in his reading of Husserl, of the notion that the pointing finger is a kind of first or universal signification: “If showing is the unity of gesture and perception in signs, if signification is assigned to the pointing finger and the eye, and if this assignation is prescribed for every sign, whether indicative or expressive, discursive or nondiscursive, what can be said about speech and time?”
In thinking of how color determines even this sign, this pointing finger, we might remember how Wittgenstein notes that what is perceived should really be more ambiguous, more strange: “Wittgenstein describes the hypothetical origin of language as ‘ostensive teaching,’ derived from ‘the teacher’s pointing to the objects, directing the child’s attention to them, and at the same time uttering a word; for instance, the word ‘slab’ as he points to that shape.’ Such a teaching ultimately relies on it not being the case that ‘a person naturally reacted to the gesture of pointing with the hand by looking in the direction of the line from finger-tip to wrist,’ but instead looked ‘from wrist to finger-tip.'”
And isn’t there something like the perception of color involved in this movement ‘from wrist to finger-tip’? In other words, there is a movement that is enacted even prior to our developed capacity to read signposts, follow arrows, determine a path. Our eyes are always motivated, like idiot children, by a kind of incautious curiosity, an impulsion from one hue to another, closely related. In other words, there is a way that we have yet to achieve consciousness in our body. Even as the relevant question arises–is it possible to achieve such consciousness, and merely by the means of reading?–I hope that my careful reading of these philosophers might enhance the body’s capacity to recognize itself.
Though the question still remains, and further asks: assuming it were possible to achieve such consciousness of self, would such consciousness even be desirable? Or is it possible that my lengthy investigation of knots, of topological complexity or uncertainty, is side-lining more relevant political and worldly issues? In dwelling on that question, I am reminded of Edward Said’s notion of “contrapuntal” reading, which seems to be engaged with precisely this question of complex topology, and which seems to be relevant to political–particularly post-colonial–discourse.
Said claims that such a reading is inherently political, because “[b]y looking at the different experiences contrapuntally, as making up a set of what [he] call[s] intertwined and overlapping histories [emphasis mine], [he] shall try to formulate an alternative both to a politics of blame and to the even more destructive politics of confrontation and hostility.” There is a kind of enlightened sublimation of opposites, an achievement of memory and consciousness, because “[a] more interesting type of secular interpretation can emerge, altogether more rewarding than the denunciations of the past, the expressions of regret for its having ended, or–even more wasteful because violent and far too easy and attractive–the hostility between Western and non-Western cultures that leads to crises.” “The point is that contrapuntal reading must take account of both processes, that of imperialism and that of resistance to it, which can be done by extending our reading of the texts to include what was once forcibly excluded”.
In emphasizing how history is intertwined and overlapping, I mean to indicate that Said’s definition of contrapuntal reading seems to offer Said’s own way of dealing with the same ethical dilemma: knottiness. Specifically, Said denies a kind of total awareness, a “catholicity of vision”, which might remind us of how knots are–according to Levinas–a particularly Jewish affair: “If these ideas of counterpoint, intertwining, and integration have anything more to them than a blandly uplifting suggestion for catholicity of vision, it is that they reaffirm the historical experience of imperialism as a matter first of interdependent histories, overlapping domains, second of something requiring intellectual and political choices.”
The knots begin to arise from the tangle of interconnected–intertwining and overlapping–lives, where any attempt to map the busy intersections of the modern world would create a criss-crossed web of red yarn; a weave that even the most accomplished intellectual would struggle to understand.
“I would venture to say that if one began to look for something like an imperial map of the world in English literature, it would turn up with amazing insistence and frequency well before the mid-nineteenth century. And turn up not only with the inert regularity suggesting something taken for granted, but–more interestingly–threaded through, forming a vital part of the texture of linguistic and cultural practice. There were established English offshore interests in Ireland, America, the Caribbean, and Asia from the sixteenth century on, and even a quick inventory reveals poets, philosophers, historians, dramatists, statesmen, novelists, travel writers, chroniclers, soldiers, and fabulists who prized, cared for, and traced these interests with continuing concern.”
“So vast and yet so detailed is imperialism as an experience with crucial cultural dimensions, that we must speak of overlapping territories, intertwined histories common to men and women, whites and non-whites, dwellers in the metropolis and on the peripheries, past as well as present and future; these territories and histories can only be seen from the perspective of the whole of secular human history.”
So how does Said deal with this knot? Well, it might be that Said valorizes a kind of disentangling, where the scholar freezes a moment of time, a single theme, a single person–somehow reduces the elements in order to disentangle the web and trace it as a complete circle. Or, it might be that Said valorizes a kind of cat’s cradle, where the play of threads makes proximity and distance highly flexible. What are on opposed sides of the globe in one moment will, in the next, be neighbors. Freedom of mind requires precisely such alterations, the capacity to eliminate spatial and temporal distance.
Admittedly, such freedom of mind is hard-won, requires overcoming historical genealogies in addition to the frailty of thought. Said recognizes comparative literature departments as instilling this kind of discipline: “For the trained scholar of comparative literature, a field whose origin and purpose is to move beyond insularity and provincialism and to see several cultures and literatures together, contrapuntally, there is an already considerable investment in precisely this kind of antidote to reductive nationalism and uncritical dogma: after all, the constitution and early aims of comparative literature were to get a perspective beyond one’s own nation, to see some sort of whole instead of the defensive little patch offered by one’s own culture, literature, and history.”
An example of Said’s contrapuntal reading–in this cat’s cradle sense–would be Saidiya Hartman’s work on “The Intimacies of Four Continents”, which “investigates the often obscured connections between the emergence of European liberalism, settler colonialism in the Americas, the transatlantic African slave trade, and the East Indies and China trades in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries”. “Yet [Hartman] work[s] with the premise that we actually know little about these ‘intimacies of four continents,’ despite separate scholarship about single societies, peoples, or regions. The modern division of knowledge into academic disciplines, focused on discrete areas and objects of interest to the modern national university, has profoundly shaped the inquiry into these connections.”
But when Said writes that his “point in this contrapuntal reading is to emphasize and highlight the disjunctions, not to overlook or play them down”, it seems that a kind of partiality is stressed. And it seems that this is a visual partiality, one that is “highlighted”, not “overlooked.” I imagine an artistic presentation, where a quadrangular scene is cut into two narrow, binocular circles. Perhaps the scene is a country club pool, where children of color were removed from the pool at the request of white club members. The artist has cut out everything but the hands of two different adults grabbing two different children, one white. Perhaps such a presentation would evoke the innocence or vulnerability of children, and the juxtaposition would demonstrate how systemic racism segregates, forces adults to interpret this innocence, respond to this vulnerability, much differently. Or perhaps the presentation would be of an entirely sort. Maybe there was never a single quadrangle from which the two circles were generated. Maybe the artist completed a work of bricolage, cut the images of hands from a variety of paintings–some black, others white–and collated these hands into a single presentation.
In any case, “[i]n practical terms, ‘contrapuntal reading’ as [Said] ha[s] called it means reading a text with an understanding of what is involved when an author shows, for instance, that a colonial sugar plantation is seen as important to the process of maintaining a particular style of life in England”. Specifically, Said has in mind how “Jane Austen sees the legitimacy of Sir Thomas Bertram’s overseas properties as a natural extension of the calm, the order, the beauties of Mansfield Park, one central estate validating the economically supportive role of the peripheral other.” The person whose sight feels full–whose observation feels like an accurate prediction for what lies beyond it–generates awful inaccuracies when assuming that colonies, “oversea properties”, are as naturally calm, orderly and beautiful as the vista of Mansfield Park. The takeaways are double: first, certain privileged, “central”, visions obscure “peripheral” others; and, second, no vision is complete, nobody could generalize from Mansfield Park, or from elsewhere. It is for this reason that I have offered a visual analogue to Said’s contrapuntal reading with binocular images that remain narrow or microscopic–like looking through a keyhole.
Yet Said doesn’t want to fully admit that such a view will always be partial. He seems to remain hopeful that he is creating a synopsis, cutting out the scraps, making a shortcut, carving a clear path. It is for that reason that he must explain “why it is that [his] attempts at a contrapuntal reading are perhaps eccentric or odd.” He explains that he has given up anything like a complete narration; some bits must be left out: “although I proceed along generally chronological lines, from the beginning to the end of the nineteenth century, I am not in fact trying to provide a consecutive sequence of events, trends, or works.” But then something greater seems to be achieved, some full Form of an Idea, like a solar concentration, because: “the overall argument is that these cultural works which interest me irradiate and interfere with apparently stable and impermeable categories”.
There remains an extent to which Said remains a Platonist here, at least an “apparently stable” one, even as Said knows better than to be both a Platonist and a post-colonialist. So perhaps Said distrusts the cat’s cradle kind of approach, where the cat’s cradle drastically changes the proximity of things, perhaps removes useless spaces between things, as a means of generating more useful juxtapositions. That approach seems to adhere to visual totality, and therefore becomes suspect, perhaps represents a kind of Enlightenment progressivism, an assertion of certainty, when Said wants to emphasize positionality and partiality.
It may be that visual metaphors cannot but evoke the blindness of one’s back, the asymmetry of what is left out of frame. So, as the visual metaphors grow more suspect to Said as a means of exclusion, he shifts to using auditory metaphors, as a way of explaining how his contrapuntal reading is not overly exclusive: “As we look back at the cultural archive, we begin to reread it not univocally but contrapuntally, with a simultaneous awareness both of the metropolitan history that is narrated and of those other histories against which (and together with which) the dominating discourse acts.” Here, univocity comes to take the place of the problematic center that Mansfield Park held, whereas a contrapuntal polyvocity is able to maintain multiple referents in “simultaneous awareness.”
It is worth noting that Said’s ability to generate an auditory metaphor is itself the result of his self-cultivation as a musician, a successful piano player. In “Criticism, Culture and Performance”, an interview that precedes the publication of Culture and Imperialism, Said explains his tentative plans for a contrapuntal reading, a text not-yet published. As he explains (and I’m doing my own cat’s cradle here), “[t]he isolation of musical culture from what is called literary culture is almost total”, which is a shame because he is “interested in the role of music in the construction of social space.” In other words, auditory metaphors provide an avenue for exploring spatiality that differs from visual metaphors–perhaps that is not so myopic, so exclusionary.
Said explains that his insight into the sonic construction of social space is generated by his own particular situation, because, his “own background is that of a pianist”, and “one cannot really worry about music seriously without some active participation in musical life.” And then, in explaining his interest in music, he relies on the metaphor of entanglement: “I seem to have always been interested in the phenomenon of polyphony of one sort or another. Musically, I’m very interested in contrapuntal writing, and contrapuntal forms. The kind of complexity that is available, aesthetically, to the whole range from consonant to dissonant, the tying [emphasis mine] together of multiple voices in a kind of disciplined whole, is something that I find tremendously appealing.”
Perhaps one would contest the explanation that I have offered, which claims that Said distrusts Platonic Forms. But Said explains that he is precisely against such stable categories, such eternal identities: “[B]y counterpoint I mean things that can’t be reduced to homophony. That can’t be reduced to a kind of simple reconciliation. My interest in comparative literature is based on the same notion. I think the one thing that I find, I guess, the most-I wouldn’t say repellent, but I would say antagonistic-for me is identity. The notion of a single identity.”
Said’s experience as a piano player may have generated the very term contra–puntal, because, as Said explains, “[i]n the counter[-]point of Western classical music, various themes play off one another, with only a provisional privilege being given to any particular one; yet in the resulting polyphony there is concert and order, an organized interplay that derives from the themes, not from a rigorous melodic or formal principle outside the work.”
In emphasizing the simultaneous quality of sound, this definition of contrapuntal reading is synchronic, makes use of a complicated auditory space whereby listeners have access in multiple directions, as opposed to a unidirectional sight. But one finds that Said quickly changes the counter-point to be a diachronic experience. “But this global, contrapuntal analysis should be modelled not (as earlier notions of comparative literature were) on a symphony but rather on an atonal ensemble; we must take into account all sorts of spatial or geographical and rhetorical practices–inflections, limits, constraints, intrusions, inclusions, prohibitions–all of them tending to elucidate a complex and uneven topography.”
Said is beginning to contradict himself, is becoming skeptical of the auditory metaphor; he seems to suspect that the auditory metaphor of counterpoint might swallow up all the voices in a symphony the way that a synopsis might remove all detail or contrast. It seems that Said does not have a clear definition of counterpoint in mind, as the contradictions persist.
At first, the performance relied on no “rigorous melodic or formal principle outside the work.” Then, it makes use of the fact that sound has a complicated relationship to time, a kind of rhyme, so that: “Verdi’s contrapuntal and stretto techniques in Aida reach a heightened intensity and rigor of an order he rarely achieved…In short, Aida quite precisely recalls the enabling circumstances of its commission and composition, and, like an echo to an original sound, conforms to aspects of the contemporary context it works so hard to exclude.” The outside world, like another time, comes back in, as an “echo to an original sound”. And the temporal quality of sound is again emphasized when this echo is described as a haunting: “[a] full contrapuntal appreciation of Aida reveals a structure of reference and attitude, a web of affiliations, connections, decisions, and collaborations, which can be read as leaving a set of ghostly notations in the opera’s visual and musical text.”
Returning to the Culture and Criticism interview, Said explains this ghostly echo: “If you’re an exile–which I feel myself, in many ways, to have been–you always bear within yourself a recollection of what you’ve left behind and what you can remember, and you play it against the current experience. So there’s necessarily that sense of counterpoint.” In other words, the idea of counterpoint has a deep connection to Said’s sense of self, and often functions as a by-word to describe his perspective–whatever it is in that moment. Said’s contradictions, therefore, often arise in the moments when he grants himself too much confidence, and thereby re-centers the world about his own experience.
For example, he describes a process of enlightenment, of liberating minds, which differs from the historical Enlightenment in that it is a new, de-colonizing Enlightenment: “it is no exaggeration to say that liberation as an intellectual mission, born in the resistance and opposition to the confinements and ravages of imperialism, has now shifted from the settled, established, and domesticated dynamics of culture to its unhoused, decentered, and exilic energies”. In undomesticating these dynamics, Said makes a point about how the world has changed, how this change has instilled a post-colonial consciousness that is necessarily dispersed, diasporic. But then Said immediately recollects these dispersed energies, with a description that eerily matches his own person: these “unhoused, decentered, and exilic energies” are “energies whose incarnation today is the migrant, and whose consciousness is that of the intellectual and artist in exile…” The irony is driven home when Said remarks that “[f]rom this perspective also,” from the perspective of the intellectual in exile, “one can see ‘the complete consort dancing together’ contrapuntally.” Through dance, the musical motif of counterpoint becomes, again, a visual one, and this visual motif grants Said’s contrapuntal powers of reading a total and synoptic vision over even those things which appear de-centered and dispersed.
Said’s contradictions affect the dynamic of reading itself. On the one hand, he is in favor of developing means of reading, and his auditory-inspired contrapuntal reading may provide an example of answering the question “of knowing how to read, as the deconstructors say,” because “[texts] are not finished objects”. But then, on the other hand, Said adds the caveat that knowing how to read cannot serve as sufficient reason for “detaching this from the issue of knowing what to read.” As he explains elsewhere, “[w]hat to read and what to do with that reading, that is the full form of the question.” When discussing what to read, Said is explicitly against “[a]ll the energies poured into critical theory, into novel and demystifying theoretical praxes like the new historicism and deconstruction and Marxism” because they “have avoided the major” problem, “namely imperialism.” It is unclear if the matter is finally a matter of what to read or how, when Said explains that “[t]his massive avoidance has sustained a canonical inclusion and exclusion; you include the Rousseaus, the Nietzsches, the Wordsworths, the Dickenses, Flauberts, and so on, and at the same you exclude their relationships with the protracted, complex, and striated work of empire.”
While a reader might take this to be a derogation of the Western canon, it seems that Said is more interested in interpreting these Western authors according to their colonial context. “I’m interested in the canon. I’m very conservative in the sense that I think that there is something to be said, at least on the level of preference and pleasure, for aspects of work that has persisted and endured and has acquired and accreted to it a huge mass of differing interpretations, ranging from hatred to reverence…My view is to assimilate to canons these other contrapuntal lines.” Here, counterpoint seems to mean adding something to the margins of canonical texts, the comments “ranging from hatred to reverence”, not replacing these texts.
As he explains in the Culture and Criticism interview, Said favors the development of excellent readers, and is happy to use whichever authors or pieces of text are available, so long as they suffice in raising the status of cleverer readers, not Great Authors. It’s a continuous and shifting effort, ever-individual, so that: “[i]n all of the discussions that have been going on in literary studies about the canon, and the whole question of the Western tradition, it seems to me that one of the great fallacies, in my view, has been the one that suggests that you, first of all, show how the canon is the result of a conspiracy-a sort of white male cabal-of people who, for example, turned Hawthorne into one of the great cult figures of American literature and prevented a whole host of, for example, more popular women writers of the time, or regional writers, and so on…Therefore what is enjoined upon holders of this view is you push aside Hawthorne and you start reading these other people.” It’s not simply a matter of what to read, because this would only “supplant one canon by another, which, it seems to me, really reinforces the whole idea of canon and, of course, all of the authority that goes with it…” The authority mentioned here likely assimilates the author-ity mentioned by Barthes in “The Death of the Author.” We have already seen how Said paraphrases Barthes: “Texts are not finished objects”.
When Said remarks that “[c]ritical theory and literary historical scholarship have reinterpreted and revalidated major swatches of Western literature, art, and philosophy,” it seems that the refinement of Western literature, art, and philosophy might mean a kind of extracting from texts, parsing the “major swatches”, the textiles, into distinct, worthy threads. Then, suddenly, Said’s confidence in the how of reading declines. Though “[m]uch of this has been exciting and powerful work,” Said is skeptical that this is “more an energy of elaboration and refinement than a committed engagement to what I would call secular and affiliated criticism”.
It seems that, according to the spatial metaphor used, this “refinement” would make room for a greater number of authors or interpretations within the same curriculum. But this refinement fails because “[c]riticism cannot be undertaken without a fairly strong sense of how consciously chosen historical models are relevant to social and intellectual change”. “[W]hy is this a matter of what to read and about where? Very simply, because critical discourse has taken no cognizance of the enormously exciting, varied post-colonial literature produced in resistance to the imperialist expansion of Europe and the United States in the past two centuries.” So, again, the problem remains that the how of reading is still limited to only certain texts.
I would contest that Said is more interested in the how of reading than he admits, but that he succumbs to the modern condition where there “is a kind of ambivalent loathing among intellectuals (which might explain their cannibalistic criticism), who feel the need to decry indolence, while also struggling to justify their own inactivity.” In other words, I mean to say that the what of reading is more obviously political, even if this what of reading might still fail to achieve full political aims, or even intellectual ones.
Indeed, Said reaches points of cynicism where even the what of reading fails to suffice as a political expression, because it is still merely reading: “[I]t is one of the constitutive problems of academic debate in general, but it’s basically unanchored in real engagement with the real world…” And when he begins to distrust reading, Said projects this distrust onto the same deconstructors mentioned before: “Look at the result of all the massive infusion that American literary, and I suppose, cultural studies in general, have received through ‘theory’ in the last thirty years: structuralism, poststructuralism, deconstruction, semiotics, Marxism, feminism, all of it. Effectively they’re all weightless…” Then Said’s argument shifts, so that the issue is not the how or the what of reading, but the who of readers; readers without a certain background or experience will always fail to engage meaningfully, so that academic positions ought to repopulated by those who have directly experienced colonialism: “For example, Third World studies in the university are a very different thing from Soyinka or Salih in their own immediately post-colonial situation trying to write a narrative of the experience. You know how sometimes a critic like Ngugi talking about decolonizing the mind is one thing for somebody who’s been in prisons, lived through the whole problems of neo-imperialism, the problems of the native language vs. English, etc.”
When Said grants power to personal experience, it no longer is possible for deconstructors to achieve Said’s desired political outcomes merely by studying “the enormously exciting, varied post-colonial literature produced in resistance to the imperialist expansion of Europe and the United States in the past two centuries.” Even if they (and who are these implied subjects?) were to study “the discourse of colonialism”, in the end, they are no Soyinka or Salih, no Ngugi. “They’re very different things than somebody deciding, well, I’m going to specialize in decolonization or the discourse of colonialism.”
And then this intellectual skepticism can be taken even further. There are moments where Said’s discourse assimilates Eve Tuck’s “Decolonization is not a metaphor”, which argues that language cannot suffice for the task of land re-patriation. Said emphasizes that colonization is not merely a discursive social space, but is a concrete reality that must be altered, and this physical condition is repeatedly referred to with the word land: “Underlying social space are territories, lands, geographical domains, the actual geographical underpinnings of the imperial, and also the cultural contest. To think about distant places, to colonize them, to populate or depopulate them: all of this occurs on, about, or because of land. The actual geographical possession of land is what empire in the final analysis is all about…” Political language is, in Said’s mind, faced with the direct task of moving people, not the poetic task of being emotionally moving.
It must be said that, though there are clearly contradictions in Said’s writings, these contradictions may not be unintentional, accidental–may not furnish a disproof of the work from outside it. Indeed, Said often holds contradiction in high esteem; he preempts the criticism that his work is overly equivocal: “To some this may seem like a failing of rigor, honesty, or energy. To others it may imply some radical uncertainty on my part as to what I do stand for”. But, as he explains, any worthwhile criticism must be prone to such division, because criticism that could already be whole within a given cultural field would necessarily fail to achieve the novelty required by criticism: “criticism modified in advance by labels like ‘Marxism’ or ‘liberalism’ is, in my view, an oxymoron”. Real criticism is always self-questioning, fails in its attempts to put forth a static idea: “I take criticism so seriously as to believe that, even in the very midst of a battle in which one is unmistakably on one side against another, there should be criticism”. He further defines this criticism by writing that “its identity is its difference from other cultural activities and from systems of thought or of method. In its suspicion of totalizing concepts, in its discontent with reified objects, in its impatience with guilds, special interests, imperialized fiefdoms, and orthodox habits of mind, criticism is most itself and, if the paradox can be tolerated, most unlike itself at the moment it starts turning into organized dogma.”
Paradox must be preserved because the living being is a questioning being, which seems to indicate that the resolution of questions means nothing more than death: “there must be critical consciousness if there are to be issues, problems, values, even lives to be fought for.” And, because criticism has a particular relation to life, to everyday life, Said regards the essay form to be most relevant to the endeavor of criticism: “criticism and critical consciousness is directly reflected not only in the subjects of these essays but in the essav form itself.” Since “secular criticism deals with local and worldly situations,” and since “it is constitutively opposed to the production of massive, hermetic systems,” “the essay–a comparatively short, investigative, radically skeptical form–is the principal way in which to write criticism.” The vital aspect of the essay again highlights the idea that to resolve fundamental questions would mean the very end of life: “there is no internal conclusion to an essay, for only something outside it can interrupt or end it, as Socrates’ death is decreed offstage and abruptly ends his life of questioning.” “[F]orm is the reality of the essay, and form gives the essayist a voice with which to ask questions of life, even if that form must always make use of…what seems to be the purely occasional subject matter of its investigations…”
Said therefore evokes traditions of organicism, of vitalism and of immanence, traditions which note a divide between the world of life and of text, with great preference for in vivo reality. Ultimately, it is the worldly aspect of the text that trumps its writerly remains. “My position is that texts are worldly, to some degree they are events, and, even when they appear to deny it, they are nevertheless a part of the social world, human life, and of course the historical moments in which they are located and interpreted.” From this position, Jonathan Swift’s work becomes heroic to Said, because “[w]ith a few exceptions, most of his writing was precisely occasional: it was stimulated by a specific occasion and planned in some way to change it.”
Because “his work is at once occasional, powerful and–from the point of view of systematic textual practice–incoherent”, Swift offers resistances “to the modern critical theorist”, and Said lauds this resistance which is “a matter of central relevance to [his] argument.” Indeed, Said’s goal is to prevent coherence, because it marks the limits of what one has understood, means that one’s writing is no longer a prod for greater thought, greater criticism. It is with great praise, then, that Said remarks how “Swift’s work is a persisting miracle of how much commentary an author’s writing can accommodate and still remain problematic.”
Yet, I would contend that Said is getting himself mixed up, believes that, in order to be able to think differently, there must be a division between text and reality. The syllogism does not follow, because one could argue that the critic constantly strives to generate new modes of being, without claiming that these modes of being exist outside of language or supersede language. Said perhaps does not take this position as seriously, given how he disregards “deconstructors”; and, as a result, he is free to remark on how “[t]he life of such an encounter is, so to speak, the active content of Swift’s mind as we are able to grasp it in its essential resistance to any fixed boundaries…So constant an experience of force and pressure warrants Yeats’s granting to Swift the discovery of the intellect’s madness…This tension is exploited, rather than tolerated, by critical methods whose bias stresses the anterior privileges of the writer’s experience to his finished product.”
Deconstruction is strongly suspicious of claims of reality or ideality that precede the act of language, a reality or ideality that often exists as the meaning of the text, which “meaning” may act as a code-word for the author’s intention. Nonetheless, this temporal and conceptual gap is affirmed by Said and Swift through Gulliver’s Travels, which “uses the historical preterite as a self-conscious literary barrier between the reader and the pseudo-present tense in which most of Gulliver’s exploits are narrated.” Said highly regards (what he imagines to be) “Swift’s discovery that words and objects in the world are not simply interchangeable, since words extend away from objects into an entirely verbal world of their own.” In other words, Said commits the ultimate faux pas according to deconstructors, which is to affirm the primacy of speech over writing, an everyday speech which has obvious meanings as opposed to a text that is dead, trapped in self-reference.
This relationship between living speech and dead texts is also present in Said’s opinion, projected onto Swift, where “[t]o Swift, then, modern literature was the displacement of older literature”. “A modern author writes during the loss of a tradition. He is present because of the absence of the ancient authors who were being crowded out by a fading memory of the classics.” So here is a moment where Said’s progressive attitude outweighs his admitted conservationism. And this progressive attitude is against history or close-reading as an inadequately political force: “Criticism can no longer…join up with a priestly caste of acolytes and dogmatic metaphysicians.” Against this kind of religious figure, a priestly caste of acolytes and dogmatic metaphysicians, the worldly Swiftian critic is, as Said remarks: “secular.”
And I want to remark here my differences from Said. I believe that at hand is an essential confusion between the relevance, the worldly purposes, of both text and speech. In noting how there is inadequate active and public speech, Said seems to be saying that everything must fill this void, must become speech, such that the text is merely an inadequate speech. But the generation of speech, of countless contradictions, is not–I think–ultimately contributive to political discourse.
To explicate the importance of text, I might remind us of my earlier position:
“Who cannot relate to those conversations–often late at night, perhaps fueled by drugs or alcohol–which circle forgetfully around the same few questions and offer unwittingly contradictory responses? Hegel compares the amateur attempt at philosophizing to an argument between children who compete under the ruse of reason, when in fact their motivating principle is ‘whatever I am saying now is correct,’ when their goal is to be the most recent to have spoken.” And this ‘whatever I am saying now is correct’ seems at play when Said places undue emphasis on the great contradictions of the writer who is responding to specific occasions, or when he writes that the dispersed energies are concentrated within the exiled intellectual, himself. Although, “[i]t would not do to say that [Said is] merely childish, exploitative or self-centered; what is relevant here is the event whereby forgetfulness overtakes intention. The condition is like that of an amnesiac held captive in a room without a lock.
What I’m trying to say is that the experience of the written word differs from conversation in that it holds a more particular relation to memory.”
The text should be predictive, uninterrupted. In contrast, speech or conversation must be responsive. And by responsive I mean that the conversant does not yet know the Other’s desire, must wait for it to be spoken before one can respond. The worldly nature of speech, of education, is that there exist contexts of unpredictability, where one does need to respond. But it is equally true that there is a capacity for texts to predict, which may be seen whenever a text succeeds in flowing as narrative. Indeed, there is an extent to which the essay’s refusal to give up a question is what Said wants, even as he professes that essays are prone to sputtering short starts.
I might further say that I agree with Said that there has been close-readers have been cloistered with their classmates, and that this seclusion is politically and aesthetically destructive. But this is not to say that close-reading is not aesthetically meaningful, or that reading should attempt to achieve political aims that are foreign to it–that English professors have access to political understanding more than other citizens. When Said critiques an over-emphasis on the how in place of the what of reading, he often has political demands on his mind that likely cannot be answered by any academic position or effort. In other words, there is a space required for expertise in close-reading, in creating the how of reading; the crisis arises because contemporary society has been so specialized:
“We might want to think of how contemporary society, since it cannot successfully partition each individual’s day into relevant periods of worldly response and abstract contemplation, has resorted to creating specializations, has made some experts of fantasy and others experts of the body. And so we have people whose social function is to exist entirely in a realm of fantasy and speculation, and others whose social function is almost constantly controlled by the needs of the day.”
Thankfully, there are moments where Said does subscribe to a deconstructionist position, where he affirms the value of close, often historical, reading. There is a value to close reading, because “[w]hat the critical essay does is to begin to create the values by which art is judged.” In explaining how close reading generates values, Said emphasizes “that critics create not only the values by which art is judged and understood, but they embody in writing those processes and actual conditions in the present by means of which art and writing bear significance”. So it is not only that values are generated, but that they are generated in a viscerally embodied present-tense, such that “the critic is responsible to a degree for articulating those voices dominated, displaced, or silenced by the textuality of texts.”
In explaining that the critic’s embodied present voices the interposed silences of a text, we might take Said’s unspoken or unintended point to be that the critic establishes the body’s capacity to act on itself, its capacity to perceive value in its environment. As a result, one should not accept the definition of criticism according to Oscar “Wilde [who] said…: criticism ‘treats the work of art as a starting point for a new creation.'” Said distrusts Wilde’s definition which may unduly praise novelty for the sake of novelty. Instead, he prefers the definition of criticism by Georg Lukacs: “the essayist is a pure instance of the precursor.”
If the precursor failed, then it seems that purity is necessary as a means of filling in the unknown reasons for one’s decision. To truly appreciate an artwork is to see its pieces as belonging together, therefore having a kind of “articulation” that flows peacefully between those pieces. It may therefore be that once the critic has explained why the pieces of a literary work fit together, readers will be able to return to the precursor in a mode of fulfillment. If the world is always-already the precursor to the text, then the text’s capacity to eliminate and determine desires ultimately generates the reader’s capacity to go back to the world of ur-text with an appreciative understanding. It therefore seems that the work of prose is still a means of threading, of turning a disjointed reality back into a linear flow.
To this position, the position that art creates a new mode of relating to one’s body and one’s environment, I am perfectly happy to subscribe. Indeed, it seems to be part of what contrapuntal reading wants to achieve. In other words, it seems that Said’s attempt to generate contrapuntal reading is made in the face of the contemporary person’s inability to generate a signal from so much noise. Musical polyvocity may therefore represent an increase in the amount of data, the noise, that a human being is able to receive in a signaling, musical capacity. I say this, even as I think that Said’s version of contrapuntal reading is itself riven and in need of a critical re-articulation of its points.
Before returning to the question of how contrapuntal reading might alter the human being’s auditory capacities, I want to investigate yet one more example of how Said’s argument is embattled by contradiction. Said explains that deconstructors fail due to establishing “more an energy of elaboration and refinement than a committed engagement to what I would call secular and affiliated criticism”. Thus far, we have explicated the secular aspect of criticism, which is Swiftian in that it is worldly and focused on specific occasions for writing. But it remains to be seen what Said has in mind with “affiliated criticism”.
To understand the contradictions of Said’s affiliation, we should look to how he treats genealogies and land ownership. In particular, Said explains that “[i]mperialism and the culture associated with it affirm both the primacy of geography and an ideology about control of territory.” That “ideology about control of territory” likely refers to a eugenic belief in ius sanguine where there are natural correlates between one’s literal position in the world and one’s ancestry. In Said’s political context, ius sanguine is of particular importance for the case of Zionism, which displaces Palestinian inhabitants of Jerusalem for Jewish incomers. The issue is that the defense of one’s position against colonizers often relies on the rhetoric of birthright.
As a similar example, in Eve Tuck’s “Decolonization is not a metaphor”, we might ask: is the violence of settler colonialism the same as the violence of capitalism, a mode of relating to one’s environment that is destructive and inhumane, less ecological and more proprietary? Or, is it that the wrong people are landowners, and that new management is needed? What land in what condition is to be returned to whom? The very positing of such questions undermines Tuck’s claim that these are purely material, non-metaphorical issues, and that the struggle for conceptual definitions is an obfuscation of material interests.
And yet another, similar process is at work in Marxist geography, e.g. how the matter of wealth inheritance is handled by Ruth Wilson Gilmore. In her essay on being “in the shadow of the shadow state”, one finds the traditional dialectic of theory: the battle between Marx’s progressive socialism and the more conservative tradition of German idealism. As a Marxist, and as a critical geographer who repeatedly states that “forms shapes norms,” Gilmore criticizes idealism. In particular, Gilmore notes how “as of the end of the last century, the Right had raised more than $1 billion to fund ideas. [emphasis hers]” Gilmore then derides the position of liberals who favor investment in think-tanks and policy-makers–i.e. in the non-profit industrial complex–by sarcastically suggesting that “if the results enjoyed by the activist Right are any indication, $1 billion for ideas would go a long way toward regenerating the devastated landscape of social justice. [emphases mine]” The point of Gilmore’s sarcasm is that investing in education does not actually change the concrete realities, the environment, that people live in: “Funders who want to return their inherited wealth to the communities who produced it should reflect on whether they are building glorious edifices that in the end perpetuate inequality. [emphasis mine]”
Gilmore explains her position that “forms shape norms” by defining form as “the lived relations and imaginative possibilities emanating from those relationships,” which is “a resolutely geographical concept, because it is about making pathways and places rather than searching endlessly for the perfect method and mode.” In other words, contemporary trends–particularly academic trends–owe to the history of idealist philosophy a penchant for making things more complicated than they need to be, often through a messy entangle of language. The point is well taken if we consider how the rise in cancer may not necessitate a greater need for medical research, so much as it demands, more simply, a decrease in the use of carcinogenic production systems, and a re-investment in natural, sustainable resources.
The argument is at least partially hindered by the fact that Gilmore is herself highly educated and her language is theoretically complex, so that one might wonder the extent to which investment in intellect–in “method and mode”–is necessary in addition to investment in geography, in “pathways and places.”
The matter of dealing with the genetic mapping of property, as well as dealing with another intellectual-cultural force that determines how people inhabit space, might be fruitfully understood by comparing Said and Hayden White as a way of understanding “affiliated criticism”. As Said remarks, ” [e]ven if we accept (as in the main I do) the arguments put forward by Hayden White–that there is no way to get past texts in order to apprehend ‘real’ history directly–it is still possible to say that such a claim need not also eliminate interest in the events and the circumstances entailed by and expressed in the texts themselves.” So White comes to represent for Said a certain way that material relationships are not directly accessible, even as Said feels a political urgency to address such material conditions. Relatedly, it may also be the case that White figures in Said’s mind regarding the filiative and affiliative dimensions of the natural and artificial, the biological and the humanistic.
As Hans Kellner explains, White’s oeuvre was stamped by a little-known work on the relationship between nature and choice: “in one remarkable, brief gesture, an obscure talk that he never chose to place in a published volume of his own, White made a point that heralded his later work and his break from the commonsense logic of things.” That gesture occurred “[t]oward the end of 1967, [when] White spoke in Denver at a conference devoted to the relation of biology and history.” Faced with “an odd assortment of scientists, philosophers, and humanists, White maintained that the difference between a historical system and a biological system is that the biological past is given, and so determines what follows from it, while the historical past is constituted backwards, so that, in effect, we decide who our ancestors were.”
“In speaking of the course of biological systems, we do not speak of ‘choice, purpose, or intent’ on the part of the organisms themselves, and it would be a mistake to do so. Cultures, however, are often spoken of as having a ‘life’ of their own, as if they were endowed with a genetic identity that governed their existence. Thus, we can speak of the ‘death’ of a culture and the ‘birth’ of a new social formation. And this, White insisted, was mistaken. ‘Socio-cultural systems do not have lives of their own; they exist solely as a function of the choices of individuals to live their lives this way and not another, regardless of what the environment would seem to require for survival. And when individuals cease to choose a given way of life, this way of life ceases to exist.'”
Said’s version: “It may seem odd, but it is true, that in such matters as culture and scholarship I am often in reasonable sympathy with conservative attitudes, and what I might object to in what I have been describing does not have much to do with the activity of conserving the past, or with reading great literature, or with doing serious and perhaps even utterly conservative scholarship as such. I have no great problem with those things. What I am criticizing is…the almost unconsciously held ideological assumption that the Eurocentric model for the humanities actually represents a natural and proper subject matter for the humanistic scholar. Its authority comes not only from the orthodox canon of literary monuments handed down through the generations, but also from the way this continuity reproduces the filial continuitv of the chain of biological procreation.”
And back to [Kellner’s] White: “To act as if one could choose one’s ancestors, cultural ancestors, the ones that matter, is to create a different fictional past and to make it real by living it in the present. The historical past provides a sort of expanse over which we may, if we must, range in search of models. If a generation fails to find any figures adequate to their legitimate needs and desires in the models that the existing culture offers it, they will turn away from their historical culture and create another by choosing a different past. This is cultural revolution. When it happens, this newly chosen past becomes the past for that group, in defiance of evidence and even utility. This ‘process of retrospective ancestral constitution’ is what historical consciousness is all about.”
Said: “My position, again, is that the contemporary critical consciousness stands between the temptations represented by two formidable and related powers engaging critical attention. One is the culture to which critics are bound filiatively (by birth, nationality, profession); the other is a method or system acquired affiliatively (by social and political conviction, economic and historical circumstances, voluntary effort and willed deliberation).”
An affiliation has “the deliberately explicit goal of using [its] new order to reinstate vestiges of the kind of authority associated in the past with filiative order. Thus if a filial relationship was held together by natural bonds and natural forms of authority–involving obedience, fear, love, respect, and instinctual conflict–the new affiliative relationship changes these bonds into what seem to be transpersonal forms–such as guild consciousness, consensus, collegiality, professional respect, class, and the hegemony of a dominant culture. The filiative scheme belongs to the realms of nature and of ‘life,’ whereas affiliation belongs exclusively to culture and society.”
Ultimately, this process of (af)filiation becomes for Said, as it was for White, a matter of historiographical importance, of how history gets made: “A parallel affiliative process takes place in philology, in fiction, in psychology, where repetition turns into an aspect of analytic structural technique. Probably repetition is bound to move from immediate regrouping of experience to a more and more mediated reshaping and redisposition of it, in which the disparity between one version and its repetition increases, since repetition cannot long escape the ironies it bears within it. For even as it takes place repetition raises the question, does repetition enhance or degrade a fact? But the question brings forth consciousness of two where there had been repose in one; and such knowledge of course, like procreation, cannot really be reversed. Thereafter the problems multiply. Naturally or unnaturally, filiatively or affiliatively? That is the question.”
Let’s say that one were to read these comments while being an anti-natalist who still believes firmly in the importance of child welfare. Such a reader might want to look at how the affiliative dimensions of human cultural production–which is to say nurture, the care for the young and the establishment of linguistic, cultural artifacts–have a very real effect in determining the compositions and powers of the human body. And, regarding the widespread material need of contemporary oppression, one might wonder to what extent this need can be resolved through a non-genetic means of production that remains intellectual while also altering form, which is, as Gilmore describes, “the lived relations and imaginative possibilities emanating from those relationships”. Or, as I put it at the start of this essay, “bodies become stretched in various cultural directions.” And isn’t this a matter of reading?