|
The Public Role of Writers and
Intellectuals
Edward W. Said, 17 September 2001
[courtesy http://www.thenation.com/doc/20010917/essay
-
[article suggested by Mariam Manuel Pillai,
17 January 2007]
"...Peace cannot exist without
equality: This is an intellectual value desperately
in need of reiteration, demonstration and
reinforcement. The seduction of the word itself
-peace -is that it is surrounded by, indeed drenched
in, the blandishments of approval, uncontroversial
eulogizing, sentimental endorsement. ..The
intellectual's role generally is to uncover and
elucidate the contest, to challenge and defeat both
an imposed silence and the normalized quiet of unseen
power, wherever and whenever possible. For there is a
social and intellectual equivalence between this mass
of overbearing collective interests and the discourse
used to justify, disguise or mystify its workings
while at the same time preventing objections or
challenges to it. In this day, and almost
universally, phrases such as "the free market,"
"privatization," "less government" and others like
them have become the orthodoxy of globalization, its
counterfeit universals. They are staples of the
dominant discourse, designed to create consent and
tacit approval. From that nexus emanate such
ideological confections as "the West," the "clash of
civilizations," "traditional values" and "identity"
(perhaps the most overused phrases in the global
lexicon today). All these are deployed not as they
sometimes seem to be--as instigations for debate--but
quite the opposite, to stifle, pre-empt and crush
dissent whenever the false universals face resistance
or questioning. .."
In everyday usage in the languages and
cultures with which I am familiar, a "writer" is a person
who produces literature--that is, a novelist, poet,
dramatist. I think it is generally true that in all
cultures writers have a separate, perhaps even more
honorific, place than do "intellectuals"; the aura of
creativity and an almost sanctified capacity for
originality (often vatic in scope and quality) accrues to
writers as it doesn't at all to intellectuals, who with
regard to literature belong to the slightly debased and
parasitic class of "critics."
Yet at the dawn of the twenty-first
century the writer has taken on more and more of the
intellectual's adversarial attributes in such activities
as speaking the truth to power, being a witness to
persecution and suffering, and supplying a dissenting
voice in conflicts with authority.
Signs of the amalgamation of one to the
other would have to include the Salman Rushdie case in
all its ramifications; the formation of numerous writers'
parliaments and congresses devoted to such issues as
intolerance, the dialogue of cultures, civil strife (as
in Bosnia and Algeria), freedom of speech and censorship,
truth and reconciliation (as in South Africa, Argentina,
Ireland and elsewhere); and the special symbolic role of
the writer as an intellectual testifying to a country's
or region's experience, thereby giving that experience a
public identity forever inscribed in the global
discursive agenda.
The easiest way of demonstrating this is simply to list
the names of some (but by no means all) recent Nobel
Prize winners, then to allow each name to trigger in the
mind an emblematized region, which in turn can be seen as
a sort of platform or jumping-off point for that writer's
subsequent activity as an intervention, in debates taking
place very far from the world of literature. Thus
Nadine Gordimer, Kenzaburo Oe, Derek_Walcott Derek Walcott, Wole Soyinka , Gabriel García Márquez ,
Octavio_Paz , Elie Wiesel, Bertrand Russell, Günter Grass, Rigoberta Menchú, among
several others.
Now it is also true, as Pascale Casanova has brilliantly
shown in her synoptic book La République mondiale
des lettres, that, fashioned over the past 150 years,
there seems to be a global system of literature now in
place, complete with its own order of literariness
(littérarité), tempo, canon, internationalism
and market values. The efficiency of the system is that
it seems to have generated the types of writers that she
discusses as belonging to such different categories as
assimilated, dissident and translated figures--all of
them both individualized and classified in what she shows
is a highly efficient, globalized, quasi-market system.
The drift of her argument is to show that this powerful
and all-pervasive system can go even as far as
stimulating a kind of independence from itself, as in
cases like Joyce and Beckett, writers whose language and
orthography do not submit to the laws either of state or
of system.
Much as I admire it, however, the overall achievement of
Casanova's book is nevertheless contradictory. She seems
to be saying that literature as globalized system has a
kind of integral autonomy to it that places it in large
measure just beyond the gross realities of political
institutions and discourse, a notion that has a certain
theoretical plausibility to it when she puts it in the
form of un espace littéraire internationale, with
its own laws of interpretation, its own dialectic of
individual work and ensemble, its own problematics of
nationalism and national languages. But she doesn't go as
far as Adorno in saying, as I would too, that one of the
hallmarks of modernity is how, at a very deep level, the
aesthetic and the social need to be kept in a state of
irreconcilable tension. Nor does she spend enough time
discussing the ways in which the literary, or the writer,
is still implicated--indeed frequently mobilized for
use--in the great post-cold war cultural contests of the
world's altered political configurations.
Looked at from that perspective, for example, the debate
about Salman Rushdie was never really about the literary
attributes of The Satanic Verses but rather about whether
there could be a literary treatment of a religious topic
that did not also touch on religious passions in a very,
indeed in an exacerbated, public way. I don't think that
such a possibility existed, since from the very moment
the fatwa was released to the world by Ayatollah
Khomeini, the novel, its author and its readers were all
deposited squarely inside an environment that allowed no
room for anything but politicized intellectual debate
about such socio religious issues as blasphemy, secular
dissent and extraterritorial threats of assassination.
Even to assert that Rushdie's freedom of expression as a
novelist could not be abridged--as many of us from the
Islamic world did assert--was in fact to debate the issue
of the literary freedom to write within a discourse that
had already swallowed up and occupied (in the
geographical sense) literature's apartness entirely.
In that wider setting, then, the basic distinction
between writers and intellectuals need not be made.
Insofar as they both act in the new public sphere
dominated by globalization (and assumed to exist even by
adherents of the Khomeini fatwa), their public role as
writers and intellectuals can be discussed and analyzed
together. Another way of putting it is to say that we
should concentrate on what writers and intellectuals have
in common as they intervene in the public sphere.
First we need to take note of the technical
characteristics of intellectual intervention today. To
get a dramatically vivid grasp of the speed to which
communication has accelerated in the past decade, I'd
like to contrast Jonathan Swift's awareness of effective
public intervention in the early eighteenth century with
ours. Swift was surely the most devastating pamphleteer
of his time, and during his campaign against the Duke of
Marlborough in 1711-12 was able to get 11,000 copies of
his pamphlet The Conduct of the Allies onto the streets
in two months. This brought the Duke down from his high
eminence but nevertheless did not change Swift's
pessimistic impression (dating back to A Tale of a Tub,
1704) that his writing was basically temporary, good only
for the short time that it circulated. He had in mind, of
course, the running quarrel between ancients and moderns,
in which venerable writers like Homer and Horace had the
advantage over modern figures like Dryden by virtue of
their age and the authenticity of their views of great
longevity, even permanence.
In the age of electronic media such considerations are
mostly irrelevant, since anyone with a computer and
decent Internet access is capable of reaching numbers of
people quantum times more than Swift did, and can also
look forward to the preservation of what is written
beyond any conceivable measure. Our ideas today of
discourse and archives must be radically modified and can
no longer be defined as Foucault painstakingly tried to
describe them a mere two decades ago. Even if one writes
for a newspaper or journal, the chances of digital
reproduction and (notionally at least) an unlimited time
of preservation have wreaked havoc on the idea of an
actual, as opposed to a virtual, audience. These things
have certainly limited the powers that regimes have to
censor or ban writing that is considered dangerous,
although there are fairly crude means for stopping or
curtailing the libertarian function of online print.
Until only very recently Saudi Arabia and Syria, for
example, successfully banned the Internet and even
satellite television. Both countries now tolerate limited
access to the Internet, although both have also installed
sophisticated and, in the long run, prohibitively
expensive interdictory processes to maintain their
control.
As things stand, an article I might write in New York for
a British paper has a good chance of reappearing on
individual websites or via e-mail on screens in the
United States, Japan, Pakistan, the Middle East and South
Africa as well as Australia. Authors and publishers have
very little control over what is reprinted and
recirculated. I am constantly surprised (and don't know
whether to be angry or flattered) when something that I
wrote or said in one place turns up with scarcely a delay
halfway around the world. For whom then does one write,
if it is difficult to specify the audience with any sort
of precision? Most people, I think, focus on the actual
outlet that has commissioned the piece or on the putative
readers we would like to address. The idea of an imagined
community has suddenly acquired a very literal, if
virtual, dimension. Certainly, as I experienced when I
began ten years ago to write in an Arabic publication for
an audience of Arabs, one attempts to create, shape,
refer to a constituency. This is requisite now much more
than during Swift's time, when he could quite naturally
assume that the persona he called a Church of England man
was in fact his real, very stable and quite small
audience.
All of us should therefore operate today with some notion
of very probably reaching much larger audiences than any
we could conceive of even a decade ago, although the
chances of retaining that audience are by the same token
quite chancy. This is not simply a matter of optimism of
the will: It is in the very nature of writing today. This
makes it very difficult for writers to take common
assumptions between them and their audiences for granted,
or to assume that references and allusions are going to
be understood immediately. But writing in this expanded
new space strangely does have a further and unusually
risky consequence: being encouraged to say things that
are either completely opaque or completely transparent
(and if one has any sense of intellectual and political
vocation, it should of course be the latter rather than
the former).
On one side, a half-dozen enormous multinationals
presided over by a handful of men control most of the
world's supply of images and news. On the other, there
are the independent intellectuals who actually form an
incipient community, physically separated from each other
but connected variously to a great number of activist
communities shunned by the main media but who have at
their disposal other kinds of what Swift sarcastically
called oratorical machines. Think of what an impressive
range of opportunities is offered by the lecture
platform, the pamphlet, radio, alternative journals, the
interview form, the rally, church pulpit and the
Internet, to name only a few. True, it is a considerable
disadvantage to realize that one is unlikely to get asked
onto the PBS NewsHour or ABC Nightline, or if one is in
fact asked, that only an isolated fugitive minute will be
offered. But then other occasions present themselves, not
in the soundbite format but rather in more extended
stretches of time.
So, rapidity is a double-edged weapon. There is the
rapidity of the sloganeeringly reductive style that is
the main feature of "expert" discourse--to-the-point,
fast, formulaic, pragmatic in appearance--and there is
the rapidity of response and expandable format that
intellectuals and indeed most citizens can exploit in
order to present fuller, more complete expressions of an
alternative point of view. I am suggesting that by taking
advantage of what is available in the form of numerous
platforms (or stages-itinerant, another Swiftian term),
an intellectual's alert and creative willingness to
exploit them (that is, platforms that either aren't
available to or are shunned by the television
personality, expert or political candidate) creates the
possibility of initiating wider discussion.
The emancipatory potential--and the threats to it--of
this new situation mustn't be underestimated. Let me give
a very powerful example of what I mean. There are about 4
million Palestinian refugees scattered all over the
world, a significant number of whom live in large refugee
camps in Lebanon (where the 1982 Sabra and Shatila
massacres took place), Jordan, Syria and in Gaza and the
West Bank. In 1999 an enterprising group of young and
educated refugees living in Dheisheh camp, near Bethlehem
on the West Bank, established the Ibdaa Center, whose
main feature was the Across Borders project; this was a
revolutionary way, through computer terminals, of
connecting refugees in most of the main camps, separated
geographically and politically by impossibly difficult
barriers, to one another.
For the first time since their parents
were dispersed in 1948, second-generation Palestinian
refugees in Beirut or Amman could communicate with their
counterparts inside Palestine. Some of what the
participants in the project did was quite remarkable.
Thus when Israeli closures were relaxed somewhat the
Dheisheh residents went on visits to their former
villages in Palestine, and then described their emotions
and what they saw for the benefit of other refugees who
had heard of but could not have access to these places.
In a matter of weeks a remarkable solidarity emerged at a
time when, it turned out, the so-called final-status
negotiations between the PLO and Israel were beginning to
take up the question of refugees and return, which along
with the question of Jerusalem made up the intransigent
core of the stalemated peace process. For some
Palestinian refugees, therefore, their presence and
political will was actualized for the first time, giving
them a new status qualitatively different from the
passive objecthood that had been their fate for half a
century.
On August 26, 2000, all the computers in Dheisheh were
destroyed in an act of political vandalism that left no
one in doubt that refugees were meant to remain refugees,
which is to say that they were not meant to disturb the
status quo that had assumed their silence for so long. It
wouldn't be hard to list the possible suspects, but it is
hard to imagine that anyone will ever be named or
apprehended. In any case, the Dheisheh camp-dwellers
immediately set about trying to restore the IbdaaCenter,
and seem to some degree to have succeeded. To answer the
question "why" individuals and groups prefer writing and
speaking to silence is equivalent to specifying what the
intellectual and writer confront in the public sphere.
The existence of individuals or groups seeking social
justice and economic equality--and who understand, in
Amartya Sen's formulation, that freedom must include the
right to a whole range of choices affording cultural,
political, intellectual and economic development--ipso
facto will lead to a desire for articulation rather than
silence. It almost goes without saying that for the
American intellectual the responsibility is greater, the
openings numerous, the challenge very difficult. The
United States, after all, is the only global power; it
intervenes nearly everywhere, and its resources for
domination are very great, although far from
infinite.
The intellectual's role generally is to uncover and
elucidate the contest, to challenge and defeat both an
imposed silence and the normalized quiet of unseen power,
wherever and whenever possible. For there is a social and
intellectual equivalence between this mass of overbearing
collective interests and the discourse used to justify,
disguise or mystify its workings while at the same time
preventing objections or challenges to it. In this day,
and almost universally, phrases such as "the free
market," "privatization," "less government" and others
like them have become the orthodoxy of globalization, its
counterfeit universals. They are staples of the dominant
discourse, designed to create consent and tacit approval.
From that nexus emanate such ideological confections as
"the West," the "clash of civilizations," "traditional
values" and "identity" (perhaps the most overused phrases
in the global lexicon today). All these are deployed not
as they sometimes seem to be--as instigations for
debate--but quite the opposite, to stifle, pre-empt and
crush dissent whenever the false universals face
resistance or questioning.
The main goal of this dominant discourse is to fashion
the merciless logic of corporate profit-making and
political power into a normal state of affairs. Behind
the Punch and Judy show of energetic debate concerning
the West and Islam, for example, all manner of
antidemocratic, sanctimonious and alienating devices (the
theory of the Great Satan or of the rogue state and
terrorism) are in place as diversions from the social and
economic disentitlements occurring in reality. In one
place, Hashemi Rafsanjani exhorts the Iranian Parliament
to greater degrees of Islamization as a defense against
America; in the other, Bush, Blair and their feeble
partners prepare their citizens for an indeterminate war
against Islamic terrorism, rogue states and the rest.
Realism and its close associate, pragmatism, are
mobilized from their real philosophical context in the
work of Peirce, Dewey and James, and put to forced labor
in the boardroom where, as Gore Vidal has put it, the
real decisions about government and presidential
candidates are made. Much as one is for elections, it is
also a bitter truth that elections do not automatically
produce democracy or democratic results. Ask any
Floridian.
The intellectual can offer instead a dispassionate
account of how identity, tradition and the nation are
constructed entities, most often in the insidious form of
binary oppositions that are inevitably expressed as
hostile attitudes to the Other. Pierre Bourdieu and his
associates have very interestingly suggested that
Clinton-Blair neoliberalism, which built on the
conservative dismantling of the great social achievements
(in health, education, labor, social security) of the
welfare state during the Thatcher-Reagan period, has
constructed a paradoxical doxa, a symbolic
counterrevolution that includes the kind of national
self-glorification I've just mentioned. This, Bourdieu
says, is conservative but presents itself as progressive;
it seeks the restoration of the past order in some of its
most archaic aspects (especially as regards economic
relations), yet it passes off regressions, reversals,
surrenders, as forward-looking reforms or revolutions
leading to a whole new age of abundance and liberty (as
with the language of the so-called new economy and the
celebratory discourse around network firms and the
internet).
As a reminder of the damage this reversal has already
done, Bourdieu and his colleagues produced a collective
work titled La misère du monde (translated in 1999
as The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in
Contemporary Society), whose aim was to compel the
politicians' attention to what in French society the
misleading optimism of the public rhetoric had hidden.
This kind of book therefore plays a sort of negative
intellectual role, whose aim is, to quote Bourdieu again,
"to produce and disseminate instruments of defense
against symbolic domination which increasingly relies on
the authority of science"--or on expertise or appeals to
national unity, pride, history and tradition--to bludgeon
people into submission.
Obviously India and Brazil are different
from Britain and the United States; but the often
striking disparities in cultures and economies shouldn't
obscure the even more startling similarities that can be
seen in some of the techniques, and very often the aim,
of deprivation and repression that compel people to
follow along meekly. I should also add that one needn't
always present an abstruse and detailed theory of justice
to go to war intellectually against injustice, since
there is now a well-stocked international storehouse of
conventions, protocols, resolutions and charters for
national authorities to comply with, if they are so
inclined. And in the same context I would have thought it
almost moronic to take an ultrapostmodern position (like
Richard Rorty while shadowboxing with some vague thing he
refers to contemptuously as "the academic Left") and
say--when confronting ethnic cleansing, or genocide as it
is occurring today in Iraq, or any of the evils of
torture, censorship, famine, ignorance (most of them
constructed by humans, not by acts of God)--that human
rights are "cultural things," so that when they are
violated they do not really have the status accorded them
by such crude foundationalists as myself, for whom they
are as real as anything else we can encounter.
All intellectuals carry around some working understanding
or sketch of the global system (in large measure thanks
to world and regional historians like Immanuel
Wallerstein, Anouar Abdel-Malek, J.M. Blaut, Janet
Abu-Lughod, Peter Gran, Ali Mazrui, William McNeill); but
it is during the direct encounters with it in one or
another specific geography or configuration that the
contests are waged (as in Seattle and Genoa) and perhaps
even winnable. There is an admirable chronicle of the
kind of thing I mean in the various essays of Bruce
Robbins's Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress
(1999), Timothy Brennan's At Home in the World:
Cosmopolitanism Now (1997) and Neil Lazarus's Nationalism
and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World (1999),
books whose self-consciously territorial and highly
interwoven textures are in fact an adumbration of the
critical (and combative) intellectual's sense of the
world we live in today, taken as episodes or even
fragments of a broader picture, which their work and that
of others is in the process of compiling.
What they suggest is a map of experiences
that would have been indiscernible, perhaps invisible,
two decades ago, but that in the aftermath of the
classical empires, the end of the cold war, the crumbling
of the socialist and nonaligned blocs, the emergent
dialectics between North and South in the era of
globalization, cannot be excluded either from cultural
study or from the somewhat ethereal precincts of the
humanistic disciplines.
I've mentioned a few names not just to indicate how
significant I think their contributions have been but
also to use them in order to leapfrog directly into some
concrete areas of collective concern, where, to quote
Bourdieu for the last time, there is the possibility of
"collective invention." He observes that the whole
edifice of critical thought is thus in need of
reconstruction. This work of reconstruction cannot be
done, as some thought in the past, by a single great
intellectual, a master-thinker endowed only with the
resources of his singular thought, or by the authorized
spokesperson for a group or an institution presumed to
speak in the name of those without voice, union, party,
and so on. This is where the collective intellectual
[Bourdieu's name for individuals the sum of whose
research and participation on common subjects constitutes
a sort of ad hoc collective] can play its irreplaceable
role, by helping to create the social conditions for the
collective production of realist utopias.
My reading of this is to stress the absence of any master
plan or blueprint or grand theory for what intellectuals
can do, and the absence now of any utopian teleology
toward which human history can be described as moving.
Therefore, one invents--in the literal use of the Latin
word inventio, employed by rhetoricians to stress finding
again or reassembling from past performances, as opposed
to the romantic use of invention as something you create
from scratch--goals abductively, that is, hypothesizes a
better situation from the known historical and social
facts.
So in effect this enables intellectual performances on
many fronts, in many places, many styles, that keep in
play both the sense of opposition and the sense of
engaged participation. Hence, film, photography and even
music, along with all the arts of writing, can be aspects
of this activity. Part of what we do as intellectuals is
not only to define the situation but also to discern the
possibilities for active intervention, whether we then
perform them ourselves or acknowledge them in others who
have either gone before or are already at work, the
intellectual as lookout. Provincialism of the old
kind--e.g., I am a literary specialist whose field is
early-seventeenth-century England--rules itself out and,
quite frankly, seems uninteresting and needlessly
neutered. The assumption has to be that even though one
can't do or know everything, it must always be possible
to discern the elements of a struggle or tension or
problem near at hand that can be elucidated
dialectically, and also to sense that other people have a
similar stake and work in a common project.
I have found a brilliantly inspiring parallel for what I
mean in Adam Phillips's recent book Darwin's Worms, in
which Darwin's lifelong attention to the lowly earthworm
revealed its capacity for expressing nature's variability
and design without necessarily seeing the whole of either
one or the other, thereby in his work on earthworms
replacing "a creation myth with a secular maintenance
myth." Is there some nontrivial way of generalizing about
where and in what form such struggles are taking place
now? I shall limit myself to saying a little about only
three, each of which is profoundly amenable to
intellectual intervention and elaboration.
The first is to protect against and forestall the
disappearance of the past, which in the rapidity of
change, the reformulation of tradition and the
construction of simplified bowdlerizations of history is
at the very heart of the contest described by Benjamin
Barber (though rather too sweepingly) as "Jihad versus
McWorld."
The intellectual's role is first to
present alternative narratives and other perspectives on
history than those provided by the combatants on behalf
of official memory and national identity--who tend to
work in terms of falsified unities, the manipulation of
demonized or distorted representations of undesirable
and/or excluded populations, and the propagation of
heroic anthems sung in order to sweep all before them. At
least since Nietzsche, the writing of history and the
accumulations of memory have been regarded in many ways
as one of the essential foundations of power, guiding its
strategies and charting its progress.
Look, for example, at the appalling
exploitation of past suffering described in their
accounts of the uses of the Holocaust by Tom Segev, Peter
Novick and Norman Finkelstein or, just to stay within the
area of historical restitution and reparation, the
invidious disfiguring, dismembering and disremembering of
significant historical experiences that do not have
powerful enough lobbies in the present and therefore
merit dismissal or belittlement. The need now is for
deintoxicated, sober histories that make evident the
multiplicity and complexity of history without allowing
one to conclude that it moves forward impersonally
according only to laws determined either by the divine or
by the powerful.
Second is to construct fields of coexistence rather than
fields of battle as the outcome of intellectual labor.
There are great lessons to be learned from
decolonization; first, that, noble as its liberatory aims
were, it did not often enough prevent the emergence of
repressive nationalist replacements for colonial regimes;
second, that the process itself was almost immediately
captured by the cold war, despite the nonaligned
movement's rhetorical efforts; and thirdly, that it has
been miniaturized and even trivialized by a small
academic industry that has simply turned it into an
ambiguous contest among ambivalent opponents.
Third, in the various contests over justice and human
rights that so many of us feel we have joined, there
needs to be a component to our engagement that stresses
the need for the redistribution of resources and that
advocates the theoretical imperative against the huge
accumulations of power and capital that so distort human
life. Peace cannot exist without equality: This is an
intellectual value desperately in need of reiteration,
demonstration and reinforcement. The seduction of the
word itself--peace--is that it is surrounded by, indeed
drenched in, the blandishments of approval,
uncontroversial eulogizing, sentimental endorsement.
The international media (as has been the
case recently with the sanctioned wars in Iraq and
Kosovo) uncritically amplify, ornament, unquestioningly
transmit all this to vast audiences for whom peace and
war are spectacles for delectation and immediate
consumption. It takes a good deal more courage, work and
knowledge to dissolve words like "war" and "peace" into
their elements, recovering what has been left out of
peace processes that have been determined by the
powerful, and then placing that missing actuality back in
the center of things, than it does to write prescriptive
articles for "liberals," à la Michael Ignatieff,
that urge more destruction and death for distant
civilians. The intellectual can be perhaps a kind of
countermemory, putting forth its own counterdiscourse
that will not allow conscience to look away or fall
asleep. The best corrective is, as Dr. Johnson said, to
imagine the person whom you are discussing--in this case
the person on whom the bombs will fall--reading you in
your presence.
Still, just as history is never over or complete, it is
also the case that some dialectical oppositions are not
reconcilable, not transcendable, not really capable of
being folded into a sort of higher, undoubtedly more
noble, synthesis. The example closest to home for me is
the struggle over Palestine, which, I have always
believed, cannot really be simply resolved by a technical
and ultimately janitorial rearrangement of geography
allowing dispossessed Palestinians the right (such as it
is) to live in about 20 percent of their land, which
would be encircled by and totally dependent on
Israel.
Nor, on the other hand, would it be
morally acceptable to demand that Israelis should retreat
from the whole of former Palestine, now Israel, becoming
refugees like Palestinians all over again. No matter how
I have searched for a resolution to this impasse, I
cannot find one, for this is not a facile case of right
versus right. It cannot be right ever to deprive an
entire people of their land and heritage or to stifle and
slaughter them, as Israel has been doing for the
thirty-four years of its occupation. But the Jews too are
what I have called a community of suffering, and brought
with them a heritage of great tragedy. Yet unlike Zeev
Sternhell, I cannot agree that the conquest of Palestine
was a necessary conquest--the notion offends the sense of
real Palestinian pain, in its own way also tragic.
Overlapping yet irreconcilable experiences demand from
the intellectual the courage to say what is before us, in
almost exactly the way Adorno, throughout his work on
music, insisted that modern music can never be reconciled
with the society that produced it; but in its intensely
and often despairingly crafted form and content, music
can act as a silent witness to the inhumanity all around.
Any assimilation of individual musical work to its social
setting is, says Adorno, false. I conclude with the thought
that the intellectual's provisional home is the domain of
an exigent, resistant, intransigent art into which, alas,
one can neither retreat nor search for solutions. But
only in that precarious exilic realm can one first truly
grasp the difficulty of what cannot be grasped, and then
go forth to try anyway.
|
