The Concept of the Political - Edward Said and Liberal Theory

'Literary criticism' for my generation has nearly always espoused a purported 'politics'.   Marxist criticism. Foucauldian criticism, New Historicism, postcolonial criticism, various deconstructionist forms of criticism, the various feminist criticisms - all argued that their activities were in some sense 'political'.

Arguing that they were 'political' was for these schools a strategy, aimed at multiple ends.  Most simply or crudely, such 'political' criticism seemed to be urgently 'relevant'.  The claim to be 'political' suggested a 'relevance' that went beyond merely explicating or analysing the text in hand and which contributed to some wider context or problematic or issue.  The reading of a text was part of some wider or larger (or more 'relevant') 'political' action, implicitly.  Of course, this claim to relevance betrays an uncomfortable sense that literature and criticism might otherwise be, or seem, largely 'irrelevant', until read in the right 'political' way.   Arguing for such 'political' (as against formal, or aesthetic, or psychological, or ethical, or philosophical) reading was a way of such criticism elbowing its way to the front of a crowded field.

What this showed was that such criticism - any criticism - always embodied certain kinds of politics, if not always of the banner-waving kind the proponents of 'political' criticism seemed to favour.   The politics thereby espoused were, in fact, first of all professional: calling oneself a 'Marxist' or a 'feminist' was a form of position-taking in one's field, in one's institution, in one's department.   It was a way of edging out or competing with other critical projects or visions - even if such competition was never explicit (and sometimes it was), every critical system aspires to hegemony and even orthodoxy.   So such criticism was 'political' in that sense. 

The worrying thing is that the professional and disciplinary politics were not always accompanied by a slightly wider sense of the politics of the institution - usually, the university institution.   It was perfectly possible to be a 'postcolonial critic' while showing very little sense of the politics of the institution, of its structures and hierarchies, of how power is disposed through it.    And further, it was also possible to be a 'postcolonial critic' while paying very little attention to the wider world beyond the university institution - to the realm of 'real world' politics, of the organisation of one's society and of relations within or between states.   In other words, supposed radicalism could be and very often was and still is, limited to a particular way of reading a novel by Balzac or Jean Rhys.   At this point, one realises that an academic claim on the terrain of 'the political' (as it came to be known, after the rise to prominence of the work of Carl Schmitt) is a very nebulous action and one deserving the greatest scepticism.

It was always Edward Said's virtue that he was, from the start of his career, highly sensitive to this particular problem.   He realised, by the late 1960s, that a claim to radicalism in scholarship was not necessarily attached to a radicalism outside the university - though at that time it was in many cases and notable cases such as that of his friend and comrade Noam Chomsky.    For Said, and I've found this a convincing argument for decades, a truly radical intellectual performance must seek at some point to affiliate itself to or locate itself vis-a-vis a politics beyond the seminar room.  The theoretical or abstract work must expose itself to the rough-and-tumble of activist politics on the street, and vice versa.   This was a kind of concrete dialectical component to Said's thinking: an argument against any critical project that shut itself up in its own language, concepts, experiences, logics and had thereby ceased to be a truly critical enterprise and had colluded in its own institutionalization and self-reification.

Said's way of achieving this was by doing what he famously called 'worldly' criticism.   A lot of energy has been expended in parsing this term by Said's exegetes, but I have always thought that he meant something quite simple by it - he was referring to the idea that critical interpretation is an activity which takes place in locations and at times which are not limited by the page or by the classroom or the library - it takes place on the terrain of civil society as Gramsci explained it and it partakes of and is related to all sorts of other ideas and activities, as part of the overall ensemble that is a culture.   Said once wrote that criticism is 'the present in the course of its articulation', and he pursued his critical work in that spirit - an agile, unpretentious, non-jargonistic attention to the way that we work on texts and that texts work on us, on how our work elaborates society and how society captures and uses our work.

Said's work has influenced many academic fields, and it has been important to many activists outside academia: cultural studies, history-writing, anthropology, philosophy, film studies, Palestine activism and political activism in and regarding the global South more widely.   But political theory, especially of the American post-Rawlsian kind, has largely been exempt from this 'interference' by Said's influence and thoughts.    So when I learned of Jeanne Morefield's Unsettling the World: Edward Said and Political Theory (2022), I was very excited and pleased.    Morefield is a leading figure in a levy of political theorists and historians of ideas who have worked hard in the last couple of decades to revise our understanding of liberal theory in the wake of the Enlightenment and French Revolution.   Said was always interested in liberalism, even if often in a spirit of disappointment at this doctrine's weaknesses.   Morefield's effort to bring Said's ideas into her field, and thereby to shake it up both intellectually and politically, is entirely to be welcomed.    A full-scale confrontation between Said's 'political' idea of critique, and political theory as such, is long overdue, and now it has arrived.

I have now published a review of Unsettling the World at the Los Angeles Review of Books, a great journal I am very proud to work with.   My idea was initially accepted by Boris Dralyuk and Michele Chihara.  More recently, the essay was improved greatly by the work of Elspeth Eberlee, Tom Lutz and AJ Urquidi.    I am very grateful to them all - Elspeth in particular was tremendously helpful and kind.

Empire and Liberalism—a Saidian Reading: On Jeanne Morefield’s “Unsettling the World”

Cycles of History - Ireland, empire and disciplinary change

These days, the history of Ireland's relationship to empire is all the rage.   There is discussion on campuses of the need to 'decolonise' the curriculum, to 'decolonise' English or History or other humanities disciplines.    In older institutions, such as Trinity College Dublin, there is the felt need to acknowledge the connection of the University to the history of empire.     

Much of this emphasis is, it seems to me, to be welcomed, though I also think that the capacity of modern university management cadres to appropriate, de-fang and re-purpose seemingly radical ideas - historically, there are few more radical than 'decolonisation' - in order to hegemonize, cloak and deliver downwards bureaucratic, undemocratic, and anti-intellectual 'reforms' is almost unlimited.  The Irish universities, most of them developed after the mid-nineteenth century, trained students at the height of the Union and going into the age of high empire in the 1870s and 1880s and 1890s.   It is inconceivable that the horizons for such students and for their teachers did not extend to empire - as a sphere in which to travel, work, learn, make money fast, get involved in politics, forge a career.  That Irish people experienced what Edward Said called 'the pleasures of imperialism' (writing about an Irish character's ability to move around India in the novel Kim) is in no way contradicted by the fact that a modern mass nationalism developed in Ireland at exactly the same time.   Only the most crudely undialectical analysis could see an antinomy here. 

And yet a certain purblind focus in Irish historiography,  whether of the old nationalist or of the newer liberal 'revisionist' kind, has led the discipline to concentrate overwhelmingly on the history of the nation, of its cultural development, and on the expansion and contraction of the British state in it - expansion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the expansion of the economy and state apparatus in the nineteenth century, and then the great struggles to shake these connections off whether by constitutional-democratic means (Home Rule) or by force (violent uprisings in 1798, 1803, 1848, 1867 and 1916).   But comparative focus has been much much rarer, and the new interest in empire is to that extent alone salutary.

So one must  welcome Jane Ohlmayer's book, Making Empire: Ireland, Imperialism, and the Early Modern World, published only last autumn.   One welcomes too her recent Irish Times article, on the function of Ireland as a kind of 'laboratory' for colonial and imperial projects ('How Ireland served as a laboratory for the British Empire', Irish Times, December 27, 2023).    One notes with interest, also, her rather more clunky or unsubtle wish to argue that the current 'conflict' in Israel/Palestine shows the watermark of the imperial age with which she is keen now to associate Ireland.    There are indeed connections and points of comparison - partition, forms of nationalism and state-building, the involvement of former Black and Tan militiamen in policing the great Palestinian revolt of 1936 - 1939.  And if one looks further, there is the interest of Zionist campaigners in the history of Irish nationalism, and more recently, the sense of a shared destiny between Northern Irish nationalists and the Palestinian nation under occupation in Gaza, the West Bank and Jerusalem.   These more local or detailed elements Ohlmayer does not focus on - she is a scholar of the early modern period.   

But as a literary scholar, it is impossible to read this recent historiographic fascination with empire without the most profound and wry sense of déja vu.    It is natural, as well as professionally and in careerist terms inevitable, that a writer like Ohlmayer will make her work and that of her confederates seem like some extraordinary novelty in her discipline, a paradigm shift which allegedly reflects the 'new Ireland' or 'multicultural Ireland' or 'global Ireland' or (worst of all) 'a more mature Ireland'.   The felt need to de-name TCD's Berkeley Library, because the Irish philosopher was a slave owner is, apparently, evidence of the spirit of the age to which Ohlmayer is answering.    But the simple fact is that she and her generation are not the first Irish historians to tackle this issue, and when one looks to literary studies, her work mostly executes an extraordinary elision of the work of a major group of Irish scholars.   In her own discipline, historians like David Beers Quinn and Nicholas Canny were focused on Ireland's relation to early modern colonisation in the Americas as long ago as the 1970s.    And Nicholas Mansergh, Smuts Professor of Commonwealth History at Cambridge in the 1960s, wrote major books on Irish constitutional history in the context of empire.   Turning to literary studies, my own area, the 1980s witnessed a torrent of interest in postcolonial studies.  Influenced but not entirely steered by the work of Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha, major Irish scholars such as Seamus Deane, Declan Kiberd, David Lloyd, Joe Cleary, Emer Nolan, Colin Graham and Luke Gibbons completely revolutionized the way that Irish literature was read.   Great writers such as Spenser, Swift, Burke, Goldsmith, Yeats, Synge, Joyce and even Beckett were partly wrenched away from purely Anglocentric frames of understanding.  The Irish element or context was shown to be of crucial importance to such figures.  The plays and pamphlets of the Field Day company, starting most importantly with Brian Friel's Translations in 1980, put the themes of empire and colonisation and their cultural, ideological, ethical, linguistic implications, and the responses to them, on the cultural map.  Deane's pamphlet 'Civilians and Barbarians' and Kiberd's pamphlet 'Anglo-Irish Attitudes', published in 1983 and 1984 respectively, explicitly argued for Ireland's role as an imperial laboratory.   All of this, 40 years before the current wave of apparently 'innovative' enthusiasm for empire studies.   And yet, most of this work is, in the current excitement, set aside or even forgotten.  Not entirely forgotten by Ohlmayer - but not treated as an inheritance to be discussed either.

And, in comparison to the eager readership and welcome now accorded to Ohlmayer's work, what was the reward of the Field Day writers and other 'postcolonial' critics?   Conor Cruise O'Brien and Colm Toibin suggested that the Field Day pamphleteers were the 'literary wing of the IRA'.  Edna Longley, a southern Irish liberal who made her career as a revisionist polemicist and gifted poetry critic at Queens, could only sneer at the imbrication of 'Derry and Derrida' which she, ignorantly, found in Deane's work.   Faced with Said's argument that Yeats partook in his poetry in the processes of Irish decolonisation, she could only crassly and mockingly suggest that Said's Ireland had clearly 'gone floatabout' to the Caribbean, while she alluded to Deane's 'powerful sense of Palestinian dispossession' without ever bothering to think about the implications of such a comparison.   As late as 2000, a purportedly left-wing British historian, Stephen Howe, could write a large and apparently scholarly tome, devoted entirely to debunking the colonial and imperial framework for understanding Irish history and culture.

The great period of Irish literary postcolonial studies is over.   The theme has become, as happens to every radical intellectual movement, an orthodoxy, one among many in literary studies.   But this does not mean that the self-appointed new brooms in history-writing, such as Jane Ohlmayer, should not acknowledge the work of the recent past and see how they build upon the work of pioneers who faced opprobrium of a unique kind.

Conor