Review Essay: Edward W. Said

Veeser 181 Harold A. Veeser Review Essay: Edward W. Said1 When mimetic realism lost its last shreds of credibility, many exhausted intellectuals proclaimed that history had stopped making sense. Few realized how adroitly oppositional writers, artists, and critics would appropriate new technologies for political ends. Deepening and broadening a genre that North Americans had already met through Dorothea Lange and Ansel Adams, photographers including Susan Meiselis, Peter Magubane, and Jean Mohr have coupled destructive critique with visionary optimism to form a richly oppositional art. Their photojournalism supports John Berger's contention that photographs can disclose the gaps that bourgeois historians have papered over. Using a self-deconstructing text and Mohr's apparently storyless photographs, Edward Said's most recent contribution to the genre pioneered by Berger suggests that militant intellectuals can use mechanically reproduced works of art and criticism to avoid smugly self-sufficient narrative and to propose a radically open cultural materialism. Edward Said's current projects in cultural materialism have turned heads Left and Right, but few observers seem to understand what Said's contradictory directions mean. Canards aside — the MarxistFeminist video maker who poured soup on his book, the Norton editor who smiled "Marxist? But what beautiful shoes" — presumably thoughtful critics persistently miss the point. Catherine Gallagher deplores Said's cosmopolitan — read "Liberal" — idealism, while Bruce Robbins praises his "worldliness" into a form of narrow professionalism. The completely hostile Michael Walzer grotesquely distorts Said's effort to sustain both commitment and independence. Contrary to the caricature that Walzer offers, Said has chosen a new historicist course and like others in that channel steers between irony and commitment. Commitment demands that Said always historicize, refusing Henry Ford's rack-andpinion credo for capitalism: "History is bunk." The historic role of capitalism, argues John Berger, "is to destroy history, to sever every link with the past and to orientate all effort and imagination to that which is about to occur. . . The word credit, instead of referring to past achievement , refers only in this metaphysic to 'future expectation'" (Pig Earth 213). A fundamental commitment to alternative representational strategies unites the work of Berger and Said. Yet perhaps even more than Berger 182 the minnesota review himself, Said remains wary, concerned about narrative's organicist weakness for total form, heroic actors, and triumphal closure. His early books affirmed human will and intention, while other critics led witchhunts for the intentional fallacy. Orientalism, a later book, extended intentionality to academic disciplines whose putative objectivity conceals sordid complicity with imperialist theory and colonial conquest. Today Said prefers the ironic, self-reflective essay form, which hints at a grand design but refuses to let it flatten the particulars and details — lilting heteroglossic fragments, aphorisms, key words, music, and most recently the stubborn presence of photographs. Those rising, repetitive voices contest in their own alternative notations Said's professorial urge to compose finished work. His most recent book does not conclude. It just stops: The idea was to have rounded out the photography with the result of a direct encounter in Palestine with Palestinians, and with Israelis. But I still await conclusive news and this uncertainty, I believe, is probably more congruent with my anomalous position, which is itself a reflection of the political ambiguities in which we were all caught. (After the Last Sky 166) The text as given thus refuses an inauthentic closure, an imaginary resolution of problems insoluble otherwise. Hearing the song that calls him to write magisterial histories, Said stops his ears and allows the small facts and situated "grammar" of exile to interdict the romance of Palestinian reconquest and return. The text, as the grammar of women, undoes their reductive stereotypes, and the facts of exile interdict the romance of return. Caught in the nightmare of recent Palestinian experience, Said can hardly ignore historys' senseless contortions or easily accept a unifying telos. He remains enough of a Foucauldian to mistrust "continuous history" that promises to bestow its seamless unity, enough of a Derridean to mistrust "White Mythology" that pretends to offer "facts" transparently, all the while using figures of speech and narrative structures that belie the claim. This uncompromising theoretical rigor makes him unwilling to endorse traditional narrative strategies, no...