When Israel was created, the Presidency was offered to Einstein. He refused, but the point had been made. Jews were smart. They had plenty of Einsteins.
When the Palestinians made their first secular bid for their own state (their previous bid had been under Grand Mufti Husseini) they put forward the great Palestinian physicist...urm... there were no such creatures so they had to settle for a Prof. of European Literature. This showed that though Palestinians mightn't be Jew smart, at least some of them could speak English.
Tim Brennan, a student of Said, has written a book about that vacuous cunt which, coz the author is White, is causing sub-continental types to want to scratch out his eyes.
As a case in point, Facile Devji writes
There is a parallel between Timothy Brennan’s biography of Edward Said and the latter’s most famous book.
No there isn't. Said was a Literature Professor who was close to the PLO at a time when it was very well financed and was killing lots of people. His book was about how some European Professors or Writers had said mean things about non-Europeans and why this caused non-European origin Professors of shite subjects to like totally lose their mind. That was cool, because the received opinion back then was that Professors of non-STEM subjects needed to be not just illiterate but incontinent and insane.
Like Orientalism in 1978, Places of Mind appears at a time when colonialism and race have once again become subjects of public debate in North America and Western Europe.
When was race not a subject of debate in America? As for 'Western Europe', Islamophobia has displaced Racism with a vengeance.
Reviewers have linked the reception of Said’s book and the politics it enunciated to that facing the supporters of movements like Black Lives Matter or Rhodes Must Fall.
Some may have done. But others didn't at all. The fact is Edward Said was classified in America as a White Christian- just like Ralph Nader- who was a citizen by birth and who belonged to the cognitive elite by reason of his academic training and status as a Professor. True, he was against the Jews- but so was the John Birch Society. Anyway, Sirhan Sirhan had killed that nigger lovin' Robert Kennedy. What's not to like about that, y'all?
And it was to find out how we might understand such a trajectory that I was eager to read the biography.
There was no such trajectory. The US had only recently replaced France as Israel's protector. Evangelicals had only recently embraced Zionism. Said was exactly what the Doctor ordered- a posh Protestant who could push back against the kikes.
Said was one of the earliest non-European immigrants to achieve fame in the American academy,
Said was American by birth. He attended a tony Prep School in Massachusetts and then went on to Princeton and Harvard. His Daddy was rich and he was well dressed and drove a sports car while many of his fellow students were struggling. Such fame as he acquired came to him because of his knowledge of French Literature and Continental philosophy. It is utterly mad to describe him as a 'non-European' immigrant. He was classified as a White Protestant- albeit not an Anglo Saxon.
and I wanted to know how he managed to spark the first new debate on imperialism there since its formal dissolution.
This is utterly mad! During the Fifties, the American State Department and the CIA and various Foundations spent a lot of time studying the 'post-Colonial' intellectual. Edward Shils is an example of the sort of American savant who, backed by the 'Congress of Cultural Freedom' or other such CIA fronts, was busy fanning across the post-colonial world making personal contact with every single writer, academic, or other type of public intellectual.
American intellectuals, backed by the State Department, were pushing for things like land reform, improved education in STEM subjects to correct a bias towards Literature and Philosophy which was likely to lead to 'moral inversion' (in Michael Polaynyi's phrase) and a politics of ressentiment. This was before Said graduated.
The fact is, America forced France, Israel & the UK to surrender Egyptian territory they gained during the Suez crisis. Without American backing, France felt it couldn't hold Algeria. It would have to do something more than cosmetic de-colonization. McMillan, who had opposed Eden, used his close ties with American Presidents to commit the UK to complete decolonization. Devji should know about this. 'The winds of change' fucked up his Zanzibari relatives in the year of his birth. An African revolt led to the former Muslim elites being killed and their daughters being subject to punitive rape. Incidentally, this insurrection was headed by a Christian from Uganda. Idi Amin avenged his co-religionists on that nutter. But then Amin also expelled Asians- whom he actually quite liked. But they weren't raped.
Devji knows all this but pretends to be as innocent as a new born lamb. He is 'Zanzibari' but he won't say 'Imperialism's end was a fucking shit-show dude. The Commies were in a hurry to recognize a genocidal regime which killed 'Arabs' and 'Asians' while a crazy Christian from Uganda was on the radio demanding that yet more atrocities be committed.'
The fact is, the 'debate' about post-colonialism took on a darker tinge in the Sixties. V.S Naipaul, who actually contributed to Literature rather than being a Professor of it, had set the tone. Meanwhile Said was writing precious shite about the Chanson Roland. The fucker didn't know shit about the real world. But the CIA did. The State Department did. The RAND corporation did. The 'Manhattan Project for the Social Sciences' in the late Sixties was meant to create an interdisciplinary tool kit which American agencies could use to get post colonial societies out of a tribalist revenge spiral and onto the path of economic growth and social development.
Said was blissfully unaware of all this. He thought stupid nutters like Foucault knew something about Knowledge when, the truth was, America had pretty much industrialized and monopolized every type of useful knowledge which might have a geopolitical aspect. Said was useful because he kept madly barking up the wrong tree.
That this debate was about imperialism as a form of knowledge, rather than of economic motives or political control, might be due to its posthumous character.
Fuck does this mean? Imperialism was dead and no form of knowledge associated with it could survive? Then what possible 'debate' could there be?
For Said argued that orientalist ways of thinking both preceded and outlived colonialism,
Why? Coz Whites remain Whites. Fuck you Whites! Couldn't you get cosmetic surgery to at least look Chinese?
which made the struggle for freedom an epistemological one perfectly suited to the university and intellectual life in the West.
Coz freedom already existed there. This is like struggling for pizza while actually eating pizza. What's 'epistemological' about that?
And the context of this struggle was provided by the 1970s, a decade of immigration from the global south to the north.
In which sense, it was similar to the Sixties and the Fifties- which is when Said came to America to attend a posh School.
This movement was no longer defined by the need for labour in post-war reconstruction but the democratic failures of post-colonial states.
Fuck off! The democratic successes of post-colonial states was an even bigger driver of emigration. By contrast, some monarchies- like Emirates, Saudi, etc attracted immigrants. Too many in the case of Hashemite Jordan which is why Black September happened.
It created the educated, middle class, and elite diasporas in which Said belonged and whose entry into the professions constituted the sociology of his fame.
Sheer bollocks! Said's dad was an American citizen. If Doctors and Engineers and Professors and Computer Scientists emigrated it was so as to secure a higher material standard of living. Plenty of smart Europeans migrated to the US as did smart Africans and Asians and Australians and so forth.
There is a political aspect to Said's fame. He was close to Arafat at a time when Arafat was a global celebrity. That's why Sartre and so forth wanted to be seen chatting with Said. There was no 'sociology' to his fame coz the guy was a rich preppie, not a subaltern Spivak or a babbling Bhabha.
As a Palestinian, of course, Said was not fully part of this post-colonial diaspora, dedicated as he was to the achievement of a national liberation whose consequences its other members had fled.
That is funny. Devji is showing the cloven hoof. A Palestinian State would be a fucking shit-show. But the Brits had realized that Palestine was not viable and thus, when they departed, the thing was divided up between Egypt and Jordan. But, the Palestinians turned out to be difficult customers. Both Jordan and Egypt wanted shot off them. But, at a later point, Kuwait and Iraq too wanted them out. Let Israel deal with those nutters. The one good thing you can say about Hezbollah is that it keeps the Palestinians in Lebanon from getting up to any monkey tricks.
His work on orientalism, colonialism, and Palestinian liberation,
was counter-productive and mischievous. On the other hand, he opposed the invasion of Iraq saying priority should be given to the Palestinian cause even if it means keeping Saddam in place to torture and kill his people.
Now the Saudis and soon the Iranians will be telling the Palestinians to shut the fuck up and not rock the boat. You want Chinese re-education camps? That's what you'll get if you act up.
then, brought together two very different historical trajectories, in which the continuing struggles against Israeli occupation, like Apartheid, held the possibility of getting nationalism right.
Devji knows very well that people of his community in South Africa are trembling in their boots. The place could easily go the way of Zimbabwe. Getting Nationalism right means Devjis have to get the fuck out of places ruled by the 'zanj'. Incidentally, he describes himself as Zanzibari.
Orientalism named a history of race and empire that remained to be fought,
By killing or merely raping and robbing Devjis till they run away to Canada.
even as many of Said’s post-colonial peers were moving towards a critique of the nation-state.
Hilarious! What fucking 'critique of the nation-state' currently exists? The Taliban? Boko Haram? Is that who these nutters are batting their eyelashes at? BTW, who are Said's 'post-colonial peers'? Bhabha? Spivak? Benhabib? Who gives a fuck what they say- if indeed they are actually saying anything?
Zionism was understood as a colonial more than a national project and seen as a throwback to the past not a vision of the future, thus allowing Said to begin the history of liberation anew.
Oil money, in the mid-Seventies, did mean that Zionism got that tag. But the relevant UN resolution- passed in 1975- was revoked in 1991. This shit is as dead as Disco and flared trousers.
The post-colonial state was marked by a fundamental ambiguity,
No it wasn't. It faced exactly the same problem. If there was secessionist sentiment before then there was exactly the same sentiment afterwards.
liberating the nation from imperialism
What fucking liberation is this cretin talking about? Even where the colonial power tried to defeat the indigenous forces militarily, the parting of ways was amicable. However, we could speak of the 'liberation' of Vietnam- or just now, of Kabul- if we had some grievance against the Yanks.
while inheriting its role. After independence anti-colonialism was used domestically either to displace conflicts between new national majorities and minorities, by attributing them to imperialism,
Which failed immediately because all parties involved knew it was a 'just so' story.
or turn such minorities into traitors who had been empowered by it. This was true of Christians and Jews in the Middle East, Indians in East Africa, Muslims in India,
How come the Muslim proportion of the population of India has risen, not fallen? Pakistan and Bangladesh have done ethnic cleansing decade after decade. India hasn't. Why? Muslims, outside of the Kashmir Valley, don't have the power to do ethnic cleansing or even run amok for more than a day or two before getting squashed. This is what keeps them safe. But this is also true of Muslims in Europe and America. That is why sensible Muslims want to emigrate there. The problem with religious persecution is that your own sect may be classed as 'kaffir'. That's what happened to the Ahmadiyas in Pakistan. It might still happen to Shias of various stripes.
and Chinese in South-East Asia. Sometimes, as in India, the anti-colonial narrative was expanded to include the imperial past of minority groups in a way that minimised European dominance.
But, Islam's imperial past in India was the core idea espoused by Iqbal- the poet-prophet of Pakistan. After the Pak genocide in Bangladesh was defeated, the Pakistani Army adopted a 'mard-e-momin' (which a serving Pakistani officer described to me as Islamic superman) ideology which is also a fundamental premise for Al-Qaeda, ISIS etc.
Devji won't mention this. He pretends India expelled Muslims while Pakistan was cuddling and kissing Hindus. How on earth can Devji have any credibility? Muslims reject him as a kaffir. Hindus dismiss him as an apologist for Pakistan. Meanwhile, Palestine's future is with Hamas. Christians, like Said's family, will face short shrift. Like Iraqi Christians, they will soon become extinct in their place of origin.
From a national minority himself, Said idealised the unifying force of anti-imperialism and sought to purify its increasingly reactionary narrative.
Sadly, he did no such thing. He just babbled nonsense. So long as the PLO was riding high, Said had salience. Then it shat the bed and Said, after soiling himself as an apologist for Saddam, saw that the cause he had espoused was as cancerous a doom as the malady which killed him.
Anxiety of influence
None of these factors finds mention in Brennan’s book, which makes Said’s emergence as an anti-colonial celebrity in the aftermath of decolonization inexplicable.
This is because Brennan is less ignorant and stupid than Devji. But so is everybody else.
Why was Said a celebrity? Two reasons
1) Eng Lit was turning to shit coz of an obsession with fraudulent French shite. Said was into that shite and thus gained salience the same way Jameson and De Mann and so forth did.
2) Said's family was rich. The PLO had a lot of Christians back then. So Said got backing as a spokesperson for that murderous cult. He resigned from the Palestinian National Council in 1993. I should mention, he was nominated, not elected.
There is some attempt to turn him into a solitary genius in the style of the nineteenth century, as the only representative of his people, whether Palestinian, Arab, or non-Western, but this doesn’t succeed since Places of Mind is neither a personal nor an intellectual biography.
Fair cop, Guv. Brennan's book is shite. But then its subject is shite. Still, a gossipy account of the internal politics of the period would make good reading. But a lot of us have heard various parts of that story while drinking with Arab journalists or area specialists in the swankier parts of London or other similar Cities.
What we get on the one hand is a bit of pop psychology in which he is shaped by the desire to escape a domineering father and an adoring mother. And on the other an account of his writing that does not take the views of its critics seriously. Not the orientalists only capable of disputing some of Said’s facts rather than his argument, but Marxists like Sadiq Jalal al-Azm or Aijaz Ahmad writing from the Middle East and South Asia.
To couple al-Azm with Aijaz Ahmed would be like linking the names of Mahatma Gandhi with that of Facile Devji. The one is important. The other is silly. But both are now wholly irrelevant.
As the historian Hussein Omar suggests in an incisive review, Brennan writes out Said’s African and Asian predecessors,
of whom he was wholly unaware. Sad. Said should have channeled John Okello and run amok in his lecture hall beheading Arabs and Asians with a panga.
contemporaries, and even successors, leaving him their only spokesman in a world whose intellectual life is confined to a dozen Manhattan blocks and one or two Paris arrondissements. Beyond them exists a horizon constituted by the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, with Brennan keen to identify every Jew who Said befriended in a strange echo of anti-Semitic naming practices.
The reason I like reading Devji is because I know his community very well. Of course, they seldom say what they really think, but they sometimes let little nuggets slip. In this case, the meaning is 'the Jews who Said befriended were stupid race-traitors easily bought by a little flattery. We too have had such people who would be happy to eat out of any 'Big Man' African's hand while the fellow sharpened his panga for our necks. Do business in Africa by all means. But keep your assets- and your nubile daughters- abroad. '
But his place in the scholarship from and about Asia and Africa has little to do with New York or Jerusalem. It does not occur to Brennan, for example, that Orientalism might owe some of its popularity to the Iranian Revolution,
When guys got up like Ali Baba took power from a guy got up like a European monarch. How the fuck would a book attacking the Ali Baba stereotype become more popular when actual Ali Babas suddenly appeared?
which by 1979 had made Islam a challenge to the West in a way the Palestinian cause never did.
Coz Ali Baba is a cultural and religious challenge while an unshaven guy in military uniform isn't any such challenge even if, for some reason, he has a tea towel on his head.
Like other events in the non-European world, the Iranian Revolution also drew upon a critique of imperialism as a form of knowledge that went back to the nineteenth century.
Fuck off! It drew upon Scripture as a form of knowledge which would ensure that the kaffirs got what was coming to them. Incidentally, those fuckers claim to have landed on the moon! Is there any lie the kuffar won't tell?
Said’s success, then, might have been due not to his originality so much as an historical conjuncture.
Nope. Palestine is a good stick to beat Jews with and for virtue-signaling Jews to beat themselves with- or use as a dildo to pleasure themselves. That's why it will never go away.
I suspect his career represents the liberal and even conservative appropriation of radical ideas and politics in the US.
In other words, everybody was wiping his or her bum on that shite- not a hygienic practice but 'different strokes' right?
Brennan seems aware of this when he tells us how Said repeatedly solicited the acknowledgement of famous intellectuals such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida, only to repudiate them eventually.
This is Devji slyly showing us what he really thinks. Said was a Christian. Christians should get the fuck out of MENA. As for the French- sell them dog turds and tell them it is some gourmet type of treat. Those fuckers will eat anything- frog's legs, snails, you name it.
But while he attributes this disavowal to Said’s more serious political and philosophical positions as compared to post-structuralism, post-modernism, or post-colonialism, I think the opposite is probably true.
Yes, Devji! Let your skeptical (presumably Khoja) side show. Said's totally frivolous political and philosophical positions- as compared to genuine scholarship of a painstaking type- led to Said disavowing everything and anything coz he was shit more especially when he was pretending he gave a shit.
Much of what Brennan tells us about Said’s criticism of academic radicalism is reminiscent of the political right in America. He was against its “jargon” and considered its theories impractical and “just hot air”. While such ideas may well have deserved criticism, Said focussed on their lack of easy communicability as well as easy translation into what he considered political action.
In other words, throwing stones.
In Brennan’s telling, he was more concerned with their instrumentality than intellectual rigor, an attitude brought out by Said’s obsession with appearance, advertising, and public relations. These Madison Avenue concerns were not only evident in the attention he paid his own clothes and image, but to politics as image making, which entailed counselling Yasser Arafat to shave and wear a suit as part of a charm offensive in the US.
You can take a Khoja out of Zanzibar. You can even force the fellow to become an academic in a worthless subject. But sooner or later the Khoja is going to let slip- accidentally on purpose- the truth. After all, lies affect profitability though they may enable Punditry to burgeon.
Brennan implies that Arafat stopped consulting Said once the State Department signalled its preference for the well-dressed and well-spoken professor as its Palestinian interlocutor. This would make another American professor placed in similar circumstances, the Afghan president Ashraf Ghani, Said’s true successor as the US-designated saviour of his people.
No. Ghani was put in because he wouldn't raise a stink about America's abandoning Afghanistan. But Ghani wasn't an utterly shite academician. He was detail oriented and had done work for the World Bank. His specialty was 'failed States'. It made sense to put in a guy who knew his State had failed because, once it failed, you could laugh at that clown. Seriously, everybody hates Academics.
Said's role was different. He was a White Christian who, by an accident of birth, had a license to bash Jews. Moreover, virtue signaling Jews would be sure to turn up to eat out of his hand. The thing was sublime.
Said sought Arafat’s recognition as he did that of celebrities like Sartre, Foucault, or Derrida.
Which self-promoter scorns celebrity endorsement?
In his memoir Said even describes searching for his own books on Foucault’s shelves, something one cannot imagine the latter doing.
I can imagine Foucault looking for it, if only to cram it up his rectum.
As a result, though much to his surprise, Said was mistaken for a radical and pilloried for sins he never committed.
This is sly Khoja humor at its best!
These included not just accusations of terrorism but of relativism and the denial of objective knowledge.
Whereas the guy was simply a wealthy Christian slitting his own community's throat by clamoring for the Rule of towel headed nutters who would steal or sodomize everything in sight once they got power. Khojas don't like Arabs, though some Bohras like some Yemenites- but then those Yemenites regard Arabs as camel fucking bandits.
The secret agent
Edward Said appears to have been an intellectual as much as political version of Forrest Gump,
Excellent! Devji has finally come into his own! I used to wonder why a nice Khoja boy was writing shite about Gandhi and so forth. He was just playing the game till he could stick the knife in!
a character present at some of the great moments of history without ever being part of them in any meaningful way.
Superb! By contrast, the Aga Khan actually helps his peeps though, no doubt, Ismaili elites should be disintermediated lest FOCUS turns into 'fuck us'.
This allowed him both to claim a certain historical influence while at the same time denying its consequences. After assiduously advocating for the PLO to engage with the US, for instance, Said pronounced himself against the Oslo Accords that predictably resulted from such an engagement. Shuttling between left and right while lending a radical glamour to quite conventional positions, he comes across in Places of Mind as a split or contradictory subject. And because he cannot explain the phenomenon that Said became, Brennan does little more than rehearse this contradiction.
Excellent! Said was shite and so is Brennan. Very very good. Our lad from Zanzibar is gonna be the Freddy Mercury of...urm... whatever shite he teaches.
Said is portrayed as a hugely successful public intellectual and yet at the same time a victim of racial and political discrimination.
Think about it, Whitey. Let it sink in for a moment. Fuck me. You still don't get it do you? White privilege is a real thing- like that which attaches to Stupidity.
Some of Brennan’s descriptions of Said’s influence read like they come from a society column, complete with lists of famous people at the parties he attended to demonstrate it. Said himself seemed to revel in such name-dropping, even lying to his future wife about having dated Candice Bergen when courting her.
We've all done that except in my case it was Julie Andrews. But she kept her top on. Also, no tongues. That's disgusting.
Brennan notes that he was never confident about his own fame, writing that “well-wishers found his insecurity odd, knowing him well enough to figure out that as he moved about the room, he was quietly torturing himself with the question ‘What would these people want with little me?’”
That's impostor syndrome- which usually only afflicts women. OMG! Said was a bumboy! Come to think of it Candice Bergen is kinda mannish.
Perhaps it was the glamour he, too, sought from others.
Devji is saying this is one closeted, Tony awards watching, celebrity fucker.
Brennan does little to illustrate Said’s brilliance either as a scholar or a political analyst, and we must turn to his own books for evidence of this.
And then turn away from them in disappointment.
What Places of Mind offers, instead, are banal reports of Said’s ideas and concerns. In accounts of his conversation, for instance, we are told “A student would complain that a philosopher made no sense. He would chide, ‘This is not scholarship…not critical thinking to say something like that.’” Or “One young colleague wrung her hands, looking for commiseration when she wondered whether she was good enough for a fellowship. He responded, ‘Get good.’” We are led to expect epigrams and delivered homilies. The cleverest thing attributed to him is the transcript of a phone message Said left Jean Stein in 1994, which gives us some idea of his wit.
It makes sense to get your best stuff on record for a gal who made a good thing out of oral history. Back in the Eighties, I recall drunkenly bumping into a large man as I came out of the gents at the Cafe Royal. The big fellow said 'Sorry'. 'You will be, Oscar, you will be' I replied quick as a flash for I had recognized the fellow as Oscar Wilde. I rushed home to look up my collected edition of Wilde to see if the fellow had properly credited me for this epigram. Sadly I found something like it attributed to James Whistler. Fuck you Whitey! Fuck you very much! Same thing happened when I bumped into Dylan Thomas at the Fitzroy Arms and said 'Don't go gentleman without saying goodnight' which that Welsh tosser totally mangled in his poem titled, 'Do not go gentle into that good night' which is totally meaningless. My poem served a useful didactic purpose. Don't got without saying good night. It is really not at all polite. Fuck you Whitey! You can't even properly transcribe the wit and wisdom of the Orient without fucking up. Fuck you very much indeed!
I have suggested that Said’s historical role was to domesticate radical or controversial ideas, from post-structuralism to Palestinian self-determination and make them palatable in America.
Palatable in America, for Khojas, means 'tastes like plastic'. Compare a nice mutton galawati kebab to the meat patties used in burgers. Why not just eat dog shit?
He did so by importing and translating these ideas into the scholarship on imperialism, helping transform it well beyond his own field of literary criticism.
Devji, after a brief spell of Khoja common sense, is back to polishing turds. There is no Saidian 'scholarship on imperialism' coz...urm... that would take actual scholarly skills- econometric skills in particular. These fools haven't the math.
While important thinkers like Mohammad Iqbal in India
Pakistan.
and Jalal al-Ahmad in Iran had written about imperialism as a form of knowledge much earlier,
No they hadn't. Iqbal went to College after the 'Orientalists' had triumphed over the 'Occidentalists' in India. That is why he thought he could write Persian and gas on about barzakh. But his Persian wasn't idiomatic as Iran's Supreme Leader has pointed out. But, for Iqbal, Knowledge had nothing to with Power. That depended solely on the Will.
Jalal al-Ahmad was merely a poor boy who managed to get a job teaching Persian. He was against machines, not Knowledge. This made sense. Iran did produce nice hand-knotted rugs. Furthermore the guy rated Ernst Junger. That was cool with the 'Light of the Aryans'.
they had neither taken it as their subject nor addressed themselves to the West.
But Khalil Gibran did. Iqbal's English was good but he knew very well that there were better scholars of Islam- indeed, thanks to Iqbal, Pakistan got hold of a Jewish convert- Muhammad Asad- who translated the Sahih Bukhari into English so those barristocrats and Sandhurst trained soldiers could find out a little about their own Religion without getting the Mullahs involved.
The problem with thinking that Knowledge matters is that you then have to acquire Knowledge. Fuck that! Just gissa degree in Grievance Studies and then let us loot some nice Aid program or else set up a Ponzi scheme masquerading as a private equity fund.
Said turned the debate on orientalism into a morality play which then became part of a culture war.
Millions lost their life...well, not their life exactly but they lost their...not senses, they had none to start of with... Fuck. Nothing was lost. Some gained tenure but only coz shite disciplines were cross-subsidizing STEM subject research. This was a Ponzi scheme pure and simple.
But outside Said’s own concerns, his work also inspired a rich new scholarship on colonial sociologies of knowledge.
Rich? No. It was worthless shit. The one good thing was that these guys were no longer pretending to be smart. They doubled down on virtue signaling- how is it fair that White peeps wipe their own arses but don't travel to Yemen to wipe the butts of jihadi terrorists? This shows Neo-Liberalism is totes Racist.
Critics like al-Azm and Ahmad understood the scholarship on orientalism arising from the demand of an immigrant diaspora for recognition.
But then immigrant Daddies and Mummies started slapping their kiddies silly if they said they wanted to study History or Comp Lit at Ivy League instead of Dentistry at the State University or Air Conditioner repair at the local Community College. Fuck recognition. Money is all that matters to immigrants coz money is the only reason we moved country. If we really didn't like it here we'd fuck off sharpish.
They thought it opportunistic and sentimental rather than radical in character, noting that its claim to represent the ex-colonial world was belied by the fact that Said’s supporters there tended to be ultra-nationalists or religious supremacists.
As opposed to what? The sort of guys Ivy League faculty have to pretend to be? Why pretend the vast majority of the peeps back home aint more redneck than even the most Neanderthal of Trump supporter? After all, immigrants come from poorer, less educated, countries. It simply isn't true that the peeps back home are all lesbian coders or transgender venture capitalists who drive Teslas.
They also pointed out how Said misread Foucault, his source in conceptualising orientalism as a discourse, by replacing its radical anti-humanism with an emphasis on human agency.
But Arabs aint human for proper French peeps who came of age when Algeria was still a colony.
But agency, a shibboleth of the time describing the role of women, slaves, and the colonised in history, meant for Said the moral responsibility of the powerful not the politics of the powerless. Nietzsche might have called it ressentiment.
But Doctors called him mad.
Using the term discourse to describe the simultaneous development of orientalist themes in many fields, from art and literature to scholarship and diplomacy, Said was able to define orientalism as a collective project without attributing it to the plan or intentionality of any class or country.
So, it was just a fad like post modernism.
As with Foucault, in other words, the consequences of orientalism were structural more than they were instrumental.
Structures are instruments- unless they are useless, in which case either Darwin was wrong or such structures don't exist in the realm of social science- but instruments too have structure. Foucault and Said were stupid and ignorant but Foucault was genuinely mentally ill whereas Said was merely trying to be fashionable.
Unlike Foucault, however, Said did not emphasize the modernity and so historicity of this discourse by attaching it to any process of collective regulation or individual discipline.
In other words, Grievance Studies isn't yet an accredited discipline. On the other hand, Women's Studies hasn't yet been officially termed 'Mummy I hate you coz u r a stupid bitch.' and Indology hasn't yet been re-designated as the Dept. for hating the fuck out of Modi and the BJP and those other dot head cunts and the disgusting idols they worship.
This meant orientalism was famously detached from history and so could be attributed to the West in an almost racial way, while at the same time being blamed on all the individuals deploying it in a travesty of the term agency.
It was a term coined by Georg Simmel. It is neo-Kantian and has nothing to do with subaltern whining.
Said claimed that orientalism, never itself a modern discipline, forms part of many Foucauldian regimes of order in fields of scholarship,
of which he was wholly ignorant.
though without dominating any one of them. It thus remained curiously non-modern or undisciplined,
thus Orientalism was merely a word like Homophobia or Islamophobia. It was a stick to beat others with though some of them might prefer to pleasure themselves with it.
bringing together philosophical speculation, moral reflection, and amateur ethnography in an almost eighteenth-century fashion, which might be why it proves so useful in equally amateurish practices like diplomacy and policymaking.
Fuck off! Diplomats and policymakers get paid pretty well. They are welcome to become Professors if all else fails. The reverse is not the case.
In this way orientalism represents not the disciplinary invention
the guy just means a subject getting a University Department- or sub-department- to itself
of the Middle East, as Said would have it, but works rather to interrupt and even prevent the emergence of such regimes of knowledge and power.
How? By changing the spot price of Brent crude? By inventing fracking? It's stuff like that which regimes of knowledge and power deal with.
But this also means it is of minor importance in the analysis of power, whose modern forms can do without its othering.
It is of no importance whatsoever. It is merely a part of gesture politics. But that sort of stupidity leads to the disintermediation of the branch of Academia where it takes hold.
Orientalism’s power resides instead in its speculative and fantastical character,
It is like the power wielded by the Green Lantern- least cool super-hero ever.
one capable both of interrupting and supplementing institutional forms of discipline and regulation.
By calling each other names. Why not simply suggest that the other guy eats dog turds?
With neither a methodology nor ontology of its own, orientalism may allow for the suspension if not breakdown of disciplinary forms in the modern university.
In other words, nutters running around demanding statues be pulled down. Also, the curriculum should be changed. I don't want to read Shakespeare coz he used long words and was RACIST. I want to get a PhD by watching Luke Cage on Netflix. Not all of it. Just the parts which get me wet.
And it is in this sense resolutely non-Foucauldian.
Coz Foucault was all about the pain, not the lube.
If it is neither an art nor a science, orientalism is incapable of constituting its subjects or objects in any institutional sense, with its themes always available for reversal in the way they had been in Montesquieu’s Persian Letters.
Nothing is capable of constituting its subjects or objects. Institutions can take money to provide credentials. But Madoff could take money to provide financial security in your old age.
But this entails more than seeing Persia as a version of France,
coz Persians are Catholics. Also, Iran has an Atlantic sea-board.
or, in the historicist language of the nineteenth century, the contemporary Middle East as a version of Europe’s past.
What is worrying Europeans is immigration. They don't want the Middle East to be their own future.
The possibility of reversal means that the alterity which Said describes as being fundamental to the orientalist project,
Coz if the East is in the same place as the West then there is no alterity. I was very happy when I saw that my book on Amazon got a rave review from one Vivek Iyer. Aha! I said to myself, that must be Vivek Iyer the astrophysicist or if not him then maybe Vivek Iyer the heart-surgeon. Sadly it turned out to be Vivek Iyer the sad loser writing this shite.
remains something transient and forever threatens to lapse into the identification he wrote about, from Kipling’s Kim to Lawrence of Arabia.
The problem here is that if I can be British and Facile can be Canadian then Kipling can be Indian and Lawrence can be an Arab. Muhammad Asad was such a good Islamic scholar the Pakis gave him a high diplomatic rank.
This probably accounts for the orient’s celebrated fascination and dreamlike character,
Though them guys wake up pretty early to try to get to the Occident. The truth is guys who never set foot outside Europe, but who took a lot of laudanum or whatever, wrote even more oneiric evocations of Sultans and Harems than those bored shitless by their banal reality.
something which should not be reduced merely to a form of instrumentality or divided into good and bad versions as Said does.
Why not? If the thing can't form an 'instrumentality', what good is it? A good fart is funny without causing everybody to flee the meeting. A bad fart is a shart.
Rather than departing from Foucault, in other words, Said’s mistake in Orientalism was to stick too closely to his conception of discourse and make it impossible to see the fragmentary and undisciplined role orientalism plays in contemporary scholarship.
Just like the fragmentary and undisciplined role Foucault's paranoid cast of mind, and unrelenting stupidity, played in his worthless shite.
But such a recognition would disable it from becoming an object of easy moral judgement.
True. If you recognize that fairies don't exist, then you find yourself disabled from blaming bad fairies for hiding the TV remote and good fairies for Queer Eye. I swear to you, it has changed my life- but only coz bad fairies hid the remote.
Given his views about orientalism, it is astonishing to see Said engaging in it so fulsomely, with Brennan’s biography revealing his liberal use of essentialist terms like the Arab mind.
It's okay for Black peeps to use the term niggah. This does not mean it is okay for White Americans to use it.
Only a few years before the publication of Orientalism, he could claim that “the characteristic movement of the Arab is circular…Repetition is therefore mistaken for novelty, especially since there is no sense of recognition.”
That's cool coz he was Arab. It's okay to moan about us guys keep fucking up in the exact same way. It's not okay when this is given as an explanation for why we must be subjected to genocide.
Or that “the Arabs since Avicenna and Ibn Khaldun (who borrowed from Aristotle) have never produced a theory of mind.”
This was just plain ignorance. There are plenty of fascinating, highly esoteric, theories of mind in that part of the world.
Brennan tells us that he was fond of many of the orientalist texts he criticized. Perhaps Said’s contradictions illustrate my argument about orientalism’s shift between identity and difference, and thus its inability to constitute either a subject or object of discourse.
This simply isn't true. There is an 'uncorrelated asymmetry' here- e.g. some peeps are Arabs, the rest aren't- such that subject and object are given in advance. Essentially, Orientalism- like other branches of Grievance studies- licenses one group to continually denounce the same thing in the other group- though of course they could also accuse each other of being Uncle Toms or whatever- while indulging in it themselves. This is the also the idea behind cultural appropriation. I can claim to be British and put on a fancy British accent when I try to become Chairman of the Tory Party but it is not okay if BoJo claims to be Indian and puts on a hilarious Indian accent while countering my arguments. No doubt, this suggests that British oikeiosis is superior to Indian oikeioisis which aint P.C, but the fact is BoJo has much more power than me. Other Brits would feel it was a low blow.
Orientalism’s afterlives
By criticising free expression, seen as an excuse for hate speech, progressives have encouraged the creation of thought and language crimes appropriate to Said’s notion of imperialism as a form of knowledge.
But only because those 'progressives' were fucking retarded.
These are then weaponised by far-right states and movements,
No they are not. You gotta come across as macho if you want to do well on the far Right. Sounding faggy won't help.
having been pioneered by Jewish and Muslim groups only to be deployed by Hindu and other activists in Asia and Africa as well as Europe and North America.
Hilarious! Facile thinks Babu Bajrangi was a rich kid whose parents sent him to some tony private college in America. There he learned from 'Jewish and Muslim' groups- but why not Feminist and Queer groups?- how to boast about killing Muslims.
Often supported by or doing the bidding of authoritarian governments, these activists work to silence criticism in the name of anti-racism and decoloniality.
Do they really? Is Putin behind BLM?
Schools and universities comprise the frontlines of this battle, in which offenses against identity are replacing discriminatory treatment as causes of complaint.
Schools and Universities are facing a revolt by tax-payers and parents. If they don't increase earning power, they will get defunded.
That the far-right now operates through the language and procedures of liberal recognition, by claiming protection for its historical identity, should alert us that such battles are all being fought within liberalism rather than between it and some illiberal alternative.
This is nonsense. Liberals may have passed laws, or established administrative or other procedures, which Conservatives use and vice versa. But what matters is laws or procedures, not who produced them or for what purpose. Even 'originalists' don't say that the Constitution only protects those the guys who wrote it wanted protected. The assumption is that any law is meant to operate as much against the guy who wrote it as against anybody else.
It may seem unfair that kids whom you yourself have taught to talk can use language to convict you of being stupid and ignorant. Yet, how could it be otherwise?
It may well be that the people who created English never intended it to be used by darkies like me. They may have been as Racist as shit but that doesn't mean my writing this is some sort of fight within Racism, or the ethos of the Anglo Saxon people, or any such thing.
On the other hand, it must be admitted that there can be a Right Wing Liberalism or a Racist Liberalism or one which specifically discriminates against Canadians and nobody else.
When progressives mobilise in such liberal ways for causes ranging from anti-racism to anti-colonialism,
coz colonies still exist- right? Why not protest the Spanish Inquisition?
in other words, they do so at some risk of enabling their own enemies through the legal and disciplinary procedures they demand.
More importantly, if you campaign for X, you may lose your job to X. That's when you decide to only campaign for stuff which helps you.
And this is in the nature of liberalism as a self-professedly neutral or non-ideological form.
Which campaigns just as hard for Trump as Biden till both tell it to fuck off.
The result is often a culture war in which the number of twitter followers and propaganda on social media win battles that diminish the autonomy of academic and cultural institutions in dangerously populist ways.
But that stuff is shit. Who cares how it is diminished? Just flush it already.
Historical ressentiment and its vocabulary of interdiction offers no ground for progressive politics
Nor does anything else which aint about using new tech to make stuff better for everybody. But that involves telling virtue signaling retards to fuck off.
if it augments the repressive functions of any institution by calling for bans and removals.
Especially of rapists and drug peddlers.
Such a politics should enable new freedoms instead.
Like the right to jizz on your professor in lieu of handing in a paper on Emily Dick(in)son.
When hearing the debates about imperialism that roil campus life on both sides of the Atlantic,
what? You stay awake? That's not natural dude. Cut down on the caffeine. See a doctor if the thing persists.
I think of the Indian government imprisoning civil rights activists involved in the bicentenary celebration of the battle of Bhima Koregaon, during which low castes fought alongside the British against a high caste dynasty.
Why? Some policemen were injured. Since they couldn't lock up anybody who mattered, they framed a bunch of senile nutters. But then the previous government had framed Hindu nuns and such like. What goes around comes around. The difference is that the Hindu nun won an election and is now in Parliament. Some of the senile nutters framed by the Police have died. Was there any backlash? Nope. Nobody cared.
Why was Bhima Koregaon important? Facile doesn't know. I do. Non Mahar Dalits in Maharashtra are angry that Mahars have monopolized the benefits of Reservations. Obviously, the next step is the creation of a Maha-Dalit category. Obviously, by Mahars linking themselves to the Brits, the non-Mahars get a platform against them. Previously, since Mahars didn't own land, those Dalits who did own land felt pity for them. They had to go in for education which, coz India was Socialist, meant they earned crap. Sadly Neoliberalism has opened up a big gap between educated and uneducated Indians. So, suddenly, land owning castes are determined to get a share in reservations even if this means having to pretend to get a bit of education.
Grievance Studies in India was supposed to help the Left. But the Left- and Congress (because Rahul is a cretin)- have been utterly decimated everywhere save Kerala- where the CM wants to be the Deng Xiaoping of India. In other words, Kerala has Commies who want to be merely 40 years behind the times rather than 80 years.
The far-right violence
There was caste violence. The guys whose caste was being denigrated put up a fight. How is that 'far-right'? True some senile nutters who were leftists were framed and sent off to jail but this was because the genuine Naxalites didn't give a shit about them.
at this commemoration of imperialism
How was it a 'commemoration of Imperialism'? Mahars were making out that they'd won a big victory. But they hadn't really. They'd served the Brits and then been discarded. Similarly, the BJP encouraged Prakash Ambedkar to float his own outfit in the wake of the violence. This enabled the BJP-Shiv Sena alliance to increase its majority. But what goes around comes around. The Sena ditched the BJP to sign up with Congress and the NCP.
in 2018 led to the arrest of leftist activists like a handicapped academic and Jesuit priest in his eighties.
Who nobody gave a damn about at all. By contrast, when Hindu Nuns and such like were framed, there was a backlash favorable to the BJP.
Campus politics in the West simply cannot grasp the complex reality of empire in such events.
Devji can't coz he is as stupid as shit. The reason senile 'urban Naxals' were framed was because the Police had taken some injuries and so, to maintain morale, they had to jail people who didn't matter in the slightest- i.e. English speakers with advanced degrees in worthless shite. Seriously, nobody gives a toss about those fools. Rahul has an MPhil from Cambridge. He is so useless, nobody wants to assassinate him.
What remains of Said’s work apart from its success in turning orientalism into an insult?
He contributed to the decline of the Palestinian cause while boosting Israel. The Boycott & Disinvest & Sanctions movements similarly helped Israel. Ordinary folk suddenly realized that Israelis are smart. They could be the first with a COVID cure or whatever. The last people we need to be sanctioning is those whom we hate because we suspect that they are a lot cleverer than us. Palestinians, on the other hand, are useless. Name me one smart Palestinian. (I know there are plenty of them, but there's no celebrity Palestinian science guy whose name immediately pops into my mind.) That's the sort of thing Palestine's friends should be concentrating on. Tell us about amazing Surgeons or Nano-technologists from that part of the world. Don't tell us about Edward Said. He wrote in English- not impenetrable jargon like Bhabha or Spivak- and we can read his English and when we do we realize he just wasn't very smart at all.
He was among the American literary critics
who wasn't telling the public who the best new author was. That's what American literary critics are supposed to do. Spot talent. Explain why David Foster Wallace wasn't a boring shithead. Had Said been the first out of the gate to praise Buffy the Vampire Slayer, people might care about him.
responsible for making their field into a pacesetting one across the humanities and social sciences.
This man is utterly deluded. People were making fun of Said & Foucault & Derrida back when I was 17. They were obviously worse than Sartre who was obviously worse than Proust who was obviously worse than Flaubert who was obviously worse than Balzac.
Dependent on translating and introducing continental European scholarship
But Derrida , who had spent a year at Harvard a decade previously, only met Lacan & Paul de Man at John Hopkins. This was more a case of America creating the product it would later import. For this to happen French Marxism had to be winnowed out. It was replaced by trippy shite suitable for a drugged up generation.
It occurs to me that Devji is Canadian. Instead of Derrida he could have read William Lawvere. I'm kidding. Lawvere was smart.
to the US, that moment has now ended, with Orientalism stranded on university reading lists by the receding wave of literary criticism that reached its high-water mark in the 1990s.
Because kids now understand that they won't get tenure recycling that shite. On the other hand mebbe wokeness on Social Media could get you some sort of marketing gig. I hope so. But does it mean I'll have to show my tits?
His other books are not read. The public as much as academic argument over race and empire has achieved a new lease on life since then.
Life? That zombie shite buried Corbyn.
Perhaps its activists can learn from Said’s career how their progressive claims may be turned into reactionary ones in the end.
Their progressive claims are changing or have already changed into a pathetic whimpering for student debt to be forgiven and a job- any sort of job- which doesn't involve delivering stuff to fat, elderly, South Indian gentlemen whose bathrobe comes undone and... THE HORROR...THE HORROR...
Get over yourself. Gravity is gravity. By the time you are my age your ball sac will stretch down to your knees. Or maybe not. This could just be an Indian thing which may be why 'tatte uthana'- testicle lifting- is the Indian idiom for sycophancy. If you study worthless shite then you have to become an apple polishing little shit. Devji knows this. In articles of this sort he is, in a Straussian manner, tipping his students the wink. You can take the Khoja out of private enterprise. You can turn him into a public intellectual. But the guy will still show an atavistic tropism towards truth and common sense.
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