Between Humanism and Late Style

The new is the longing for the new, not the new itself: That is what everything new suffers from.

—Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory

"A Kind of Heroism"

As far as criticism goes, there are, according to Edward Said, two ways of thinking about the future. The first is oriented intrinsically, positing futurity within the boundaries of an already existing tradition. This mode is essentially conservative, its vision of the future self-confirming and dedicated to reproducing its own continuity. "Such critical activities set not only discrete and finite goals that can be accomplished within one or two works of criticism, but also larger goals that may include the production of many more works of that particular type and the transformation of idle readers into active believers in, practitioners of, a certain kind of criticism" (Said, "Future of Criticism," 166). Thus this mode of criticism projects the future as an extension of the already thought, a repetition of the past and its achieved conclusions. Rigidly "systematic and doctrinal" (170), it produces disciples and resists change. Appropriating the unknown into an already settled horizon of the known, this mode of criticism negates the radical potential of futurity and thus, according to Said, has no future at all.

For readers of Said's work, it will come as no surprise that he is quite critical of this first approach. While he acknowledges that it is "dialectically interwoven" with the second mode of criticism, it is clear that, however necessary the former may be, Said uses it primarily to establish the limitations and blind spots he wants the second to overcome. In this second, alternative mode, the future extends beyond one that would remain its "own." Recognizing and indeed insist-ing upon the possibility of criticism's "extrinsic" effects, this mode eschews disciples and resists codification. Perhaps most crucially, in its openness to an encounter with the "external" world (the outline of the extrinsic, and indeed that which would render it as such, is necessarily incomplete and shifting, but Said does allude to a range of contextual-historical formations ignored by criticism in its first mode; these include nonacademic institutions, mass culture, and the "claims of feminism, of Europe's others, of subaltern cultures, of theoretical currents running counter to the rule of affirmatively dominant pragmatism and empiricism" ["Future of Criticism," 169]), this mode of criticism resists the becoming-obsolete of criticism itself. For Said, such marginalization implies not simply the threat of relative silence, obscurity, and irrelevance, or a kind of historical senescence of the intellectual's social power, but rather the already prevalent domestication of a criticism all too easily managed by "the institutions of a mass society whose aim is nothing less than a political quiescence" (171).

How does Said argue for the latter model of intellectual practice? Indeed, can there be a model for that which remains open to the future as undomesticated, undecided, and radically unsystematizable alterity? Said's argument in "The Future of Criticism" points a tension that persists throughout his work as it reflects on and elaborates various models, ideals, and possible futures of critical practice. Extrapolating from the two modes of futurity outlined above, this tension can be described as a vacillation between affirmative normativity and critique of totality; between the possibility of prescriptive completion and an emphasis on resistance and the open-ended; between an approach to the new as dialectical expansion of the already thought and as radical irruption of the unassimilated, the incommensurable, and perhaps even the unthinkable. In Said's late works, this tension will become one, if not more than one, between humanism and late style.

From the outset, I hope to be clear (clarity, as readers of Said's early, middle, and late works will recall, is a measure of a critic's self-restraint)¹ that I am not proposing to locate any strict or static division between Said's work on late style and his call for a return (if a return it is) to the values of humanist practice. Rather, I am interested in the ways in which Said's late works, which...