Of Land Mines and Cluster Bombs

A fool throws a stone into the sea and a hundred wise men cannot pull it out.

—Cypriot proverb

Edward Said, it seems to me, was consistently more animated by questions of rhetoric than questions of textuality. Rhetoric opens out into the realms of the media, state departments, and those imperial think tanks that conjure and refine phrases with which to tilt public opinion and thereby tilt the fate of whole regions of our world. To be alive to rhetoric is to be attuned to high-stakes games of persuasion, to political doublespeak, to the human costs of verbal camouflage. Textuality, by contrast, points us away from the world: it's the kind of deadening neologism that could not be uttered without embarrassment on radio, TV, the op-ed page, or in political debate. Textuality has the whiff of infinite regress, of academics sealed against the world and interested in talking, undisturbed by history, only to themselves.

Said understood that it is far harder to theorize lightly, in public language, than it is to fob off some seething mess of day-old neologisms as an "intervention." Throughout his career, he gravitated toward outward-facing words, words that might lead to forms of publicly communicable knowledge—to forms of understanding that might, in turn, lead to worldly change. He was impatient with jargon: be it imperial, military, or poststructuralist. While the political ramifications of subscribing to such jargon vary wildly, Said remained consistently skeptical of the way jargon becomes incrementally normalized and, in so doing, stunts critical thinking and amasses power.

His obsession with the rhetoric of power, complicity, and defiance was coupled to his suspicion of the culture—and the cult—of the expert. His dismantlings of imperial, neocolonial, and Zionist rhetoric developed alongside his mistrust of the teams of policy intellectu-als, technocratic managers, and media-sanctioned cultural or regional commentators who surfaced, again and again, in the guise of specialists.

In the opening pages of The World, the Text, and the Critic, for example, Said exposes how the aesthetic object can be employed in the service of empire, disguising the savagery and misery of war; he mentions meeting an "old college friend" who knew the U.S. secretary of defense quite well at the height of the bombings during the Vietnam War. This old college friend suggests that the secretary is not the cold-blooded killer one might think him to be, as he orders the mass-bombings of indigenous populations in Southeast Asian countries, but is instead considerably more complex: the secretary, Said's friend notes, has a copy of Durrell's Alexandria Quartet on his desk—an indication that despite his position within the American war machine, he is capable of appreciating fine literature. Said notes how his friend pauses after mentioning Durrell's name, allowing its "magic" to work its way into the conversation, camouflaging what the secretary does for his profession and, in turn, redeeming this man of the military-industrial complex.

Said suggests that Durrell's Alexandria Quartet is one of those "novels of questionable worth, but definite status" in that there is an approved separation between the realm of the high-level state bureaucrat and the realm of art and literature. As Said claims, "humanists and intellectuals accept the idea that you can read classy fiction as well as kill and maim because the cultural world is available for that particular sort of camouflaging, and because cultural types are not supposed to interfere in matters for which the social system has not certified them."¹

In seeking to dismantle the rhetoric that masks the connections between land mines and cluster bombs, I think of Said as an inspiration, not least for his revolt against dissociational thinking—what he called in his essay "Secular Criticism" "the petty Wefdoms within the world of intellectual production."² Yet there is a second, enabling figure behind my thinking here: Rachel Carson, an even more maverick figure, who believed that the mission of the public intellectual included exposing the euphemisms and bromides promulgated by the Cold War's military-industrial complex. Herbicides and insecticides, Carson...