Edward Said as Activist - an essay in Jacobin

 Edward Said was and remains famous as a major American (and indeed, global) intellectual - a scholar-academic who stepped outside of his professional expertise in comparative literature to intervene in important discussions about Palestine, the wider Middle East, Islam, Zionism and Israel, American foreign policy, imperialism, justice and democracy.   His books most often split his academic concerns from his political ones, though a couple - most famously Orientalism - brought those interests together.   But in the early 1970s, Said could still describe himself as a kind of split personality, a Homo Duplex as Conrad called himself, who did everyday academic things in his workplace but who had all sorts of complex and controversial Middle Eastern connections.   

Timothy Brennan's recent biography of Said,  Places of Mind, tells us something rather different.   Said was, from the late 1960s on, an inveterate activist, organiser, facilitator, agitator, networker, on Palestinian and Arab issues in the United States and also in the Middle East.   Not merely this, but the activist work was not at all a contradiction or a mere sideline to the scholarly work - rather the academic work found one of its most important roots in his activism.   Writing and reading, the production and reception of texts - be those texts a policy statement or newspaper op-ed, or the most refined and arcane works of literature or philosophy - was to be understood, Said argued, as a 'worldly', streetwise, consequential activity.   

I have just published an essay on this theme in Jacobin, America's best leftwing magazine.    Warm thanks are due to Daniel Finn for inviting me to do this work, and for his support and patience in its production.   

Edward Said Showed Intellectuals How to Bring Politics to Their Work

Conor

Edward Said - Life and Critique

All my readers know that I am a keen reader and admirer of Edward Said.   I've been reading his work for a long time, and I've written about his work a fair bit.    So I've also got a good grip on the expanding literature on Said.   And in that literature, no writer has been of greater importance for me than Timothy Brennan.   A former student of Said's, Brennan has been writing intelligently and in an original way about Said since the early 1990s.   In a body of work which is still often composed of ideological or disciplinary policing of Said - he is insufficiently Marxist or Foucauldian, or his readings of Dickens or Austen or Kipling displease the professional Victorianists or theorists of the novel - Brennan's essays and treatments of Said have always stood out as reaching beyond these local critiques and taking hold of the major issues at stake in his work and positions.   This is not to say that Brennan has been uncritical - as a Marxist scholar, he has taken Said's partial appropriations of Lukacs, Gramsci or Adorno on and pointed out his weaknesses with a finely judged mix of rigour and sympathy.

Accordingly, when I learned a few years ago that Brennan was writing a biography of Said, I was very excited (not to mention a little envious).   Here was a writer who I felt could do justice to the wide range of Said's interests and activities.   And Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said is no disappointment - it powerfully and often radically illuminates aspects of Said's work and thought which have mostly hitherto been hidden.    No one book that is not of Proustian proportions could cover 'all' of Said's life, thoughts or doings.   Timothy Brennan's book gives us a rich portrait to learn from and explore.   

I've reviewed this book for the redoubtable Dublin Review of Books, Ireland's best literary journal.    Warm thanks go to Maurice Earls for his help in making this review possible.    

Conor

Intellectual Insurrection

Academics and intellectuals - Adorno, eyes, and splinters

Dear old Teddy. His sheer grumpiness, his sheer will to look at the world and its phenomena not just from one angle, not just from two angles, but perpetually from multiple angles - his prismatic vision - remains an inspiration at a time when 'scholarly work' consists more and more of dreary truisms and moralisms, delivered in the boilerplate prose of managed automatons. Adorno holds all such threats at bay. Here he is pouring scorn on the academic world of late capitalism. He may have written this - Section 84 of Minima Moralia - in the middle 1940s, but the integrity of his vision remains, and remains compelling. 

Conor 

Timetable. – Few things differentiate the mode of life appropriate to intellectuals so deeply from that of the bourgeoisie than the fact that the former do not recognize the alternative between labor and pleasure. The labor which need not, in order to cope with reality, initially do all the evil to its subject, which it later does to others, is pleasure even in the desperate exertion. The freedom, which it means, is the same which bourgeois society reserves solely for recuperation and through such regimentation at once takes back. Conversely, those who know of freedom find everything about what this society tolerates as pleasure unbearable, and outside of their work, which to be sure includes what the bourgeoisie displace to the holidays as “culture,” refuse to engage in substitute pleasures. “Work while you work, play while you play” [in English in original] – this counts as one of the founding principles of repressive self-discipline. The parents who wanted their children to bring home good grades as a matter of prestige, could least bear it when the latter read too long at night or, in the parents’ judgment, intellectually overexerted themselves. Yet out of their foolishness spoke the genius of their class. The doctrine drilled in since Aristoteles, of moderation as the virtue befitting reason, is among other things an attempt, to establish the socially necessary division of human beings into functions independent of each other so firmly that none of these functions would get the idea of crossing over to others and calling to mind actual human beings. One could no more imagine Nietzsche in an office, the secretary answering the telephone in the foyer, sitting at a desk until five, than playing golf after a full days work. Under the pressure of society, only the cunning intertwining of happiness and labor would leave the door open for actual experience. It is constantly less tolerated. Even the so-called intellectual occupations are being utterly divested of pleasure, by their increasing resemblance to business. Atomization advances not only between human beings, but also in the single individual [Individuum: individuated], in its life-spheres. No fulfillment may be attached to labor, which would otherwise lose its functional obscurity in the totality of purpose, no spark of sensibility [Besinnung] may fall in free time, because it might spring into the work-world and set it aflame. While labor and pleasure are becoming more and more similar in their structure, they are at the same time separated ever more strictly by invisible lines of demarcation. Pleasure and Spirit [Geist] are being driven out of both in equal measure. In one as the other, brute seriousness and pseudo-activity prevails.

Places of Mind - Timothy Brennan and Conor McCarthy on Edward Said - a Zoom webinar Thursday July 29, 2021

 

Hello friends and comrades

Though the notice is short, I'd like to alert you all to a booklaunch event organised by the  AM Qattan Foundation to mark the publication of Timothy Brennan's biography of Edward Said, Places of  Mind: A life of Edward Said (Bloomsbury), published last March.   The AM Qattan Foundation is a Palestinian NGO headquartered in Ramallah, in the West Bank.    

The event will consist of Professor Brennan presenting his work, and then engaging in some discussion with me, before general questions.    Anybody and everybody is welcome.   

The event will take place at 6pm Palestine time, which is 4pm Irish time, tomorrow Thursday July 29, 2021.  

Special thanks go to Bashir Abu-Manneh and to Idriss Khalidi for involving me in this event.

Please circulate this information to anyone you think might be interested!

Here is the Zoom data:

Zoom Link:

Topic: Places of Mind Book Launch 

Time: Jul 29, 2021 06:00 PM Jerusalem

 

Join Zoom Meeting

https://qattanfoundation-org.zoom.us/j/93447252061?pwd=YVVCMmErMms5Sndyam1hYjZSQWFTUT09

 

Meeting ID: 934 4725 2061

Passcode: 436938

Conor

Bob Dylan is a Zionist Cheerleader

 

Hi all my sandal-wearing, apple-juice-drinking, lentil-eating peace-loving and Bob-Dylan-worshipping friends i.e. most of the people in the world I care about -

Today is Bob Dylan's birthday.    I'd just like to remind you all of a particular song of Bob Dylan's, from his album Infidels, produced if memory serves by Mark Knopfler.  The song and the album appeared in 1983, about 15 months after Israel's invasion of Lebanon.   'Operation Peace for Galilee' organised and to some degree led by Ariel Sharon, who was Defence Minister in the Likud government of Menachem Begin, culminated in the summer-long siege and bombardment of Beirut, and the camp massacres at Sabra and Shatila.  Tens of thousands of innocent Lebanese and  Palestinians were killed or injured that summer.  Estimates vary but something between 800 and 3000 Palestinian and Lebanese civilians were slaughtered in the most brutal manner imaginable in the camps, over three terrifying days in mid-September.  The killings were carried out by Israel's Christian Phalange allies, led by the late Elia Hobeika.   The ghastly proceedings - documented unforgettably by the late Robert Fisk and by Jonathan Randal - were overseen, facilitated and watched by soldiers of the IDF, which had surrounded and controlled the camps.   The 'most moral army in the world' never lifted a finger to stop the butchery.

At this time, Bob Dylan, peacenik and anti-war campaigner, saw fit to release a song - 'Neighbourhood Bully' - of which the lyrics run as follows:

Well, the neighborhood bully, he's just one man
His enemies say he's on their land
They got him outnumbered about a million to one
He got no place to escape to, no place to run
He's the neighborhood bully.

The neighborhood bully he just lives to survive
He's criticized and condemned for being alive
He's not supposed to fight back, he's supposed to have thick skin
He's supposed to lay down and die when his door is kicked in
He's the neighborhood bully.

The neighborhood bully been driven out of every land
He's wandered the earth an exiled man
Seen his family scattered, his people hounded and torn
He's always on trial for just being born
He's the neighborhood bully.

Well, he knocked out a lynch mob, he was criticized
Old women condemned him, said he should apologize
Then he destroyed a bomb factory, nobody was glad
The bombs were meant for him. He was supposed to feel bad
He's the neighborhood bully.

Well, the chances are against it, and the odds are slim
That he'll live by the rules that the world makes for him
'Cause there's a noose at his neck and a gun at his back
And a license to kill him is given out to every maniac
He's the neighborhood bully.

Well, he got no allies to really speak of
What he gets he must pay for, he don't get it out of love
He buys obsolete weapons and he won't be denied
But no one sends flesh and blood to fight by his side
He's the neighborhood bully.

Well, he's surrounded by pacifists who all want peace
They pray for it nightly that the bloodshed must cease
Now, they wouldn't hurt a fly. To hurt one they would weep
They lay and they wait for this bully to fall asleep
He's the neighborhood bully.
Every empire that's enslaved him is gone
Egypt and Rome, even the great Babylon
He's made a garden of paradise in the desert sand
In bed with nobody, under no one's command
He's the neighborhood bully.

Now his holiest books have been trampled upon
No contract that he signed was worth that what it was written on
He took the crumbs of the world and he turned it into wealth
Took sickness and disease and he turned it into health
He's the neighborhood bully.

What's anybody indebted to him for?
Nothing, they say. He just likes to cause war
Pride and prejudice and superstition indeed
They wait for this bully like a dog waits for feed
He's the neighborhood bully.

What has he done to wear so many scars?
Does he change the course of rivers? Does he pollute the moon and stars?
Neighborhood bully, standing on the hill
Running out the clock, time standing still
Neighborhood bully.

It will be interesting to consider this song, in the days after the same 'neighbourhood bully' killed 254 Palestinians in Gaza over 11 blood-soaked days of aerial, naval and artillery bombardment, on Bob Dylan's official birthday.

Here is some more  reading on Bob Dylan's perfervid identification with Israel and with the Zionist right wing (including Meir Kahane's Kach party):

First, the  Institute of  Palestine Studies:

Bob Dylan's Nobel Prize and the "Zionist Anthem" | Institute fo

Next Al Jazeera:

The other Bob Dylan | Arts and Culture | Al Jazeera

And lastly, Electronic Intifada:

Bob Dylan's embrace of Israel's war crimes | The Electronic ..

Many Happy Returns, Bob.

Conor

Breaking the Silence - a Booklaunch

In a week when the ambassadors of Georgia and Ukraine have made a blundering effort to interfere with the work of a highly regarded Dublin City University professor of international relations, Donnacha O Beachain, it's nice to have an event to celebrate academic and scholarly vigilance.    In May 2020, Ronit Lentin, David Landy and I published Enforcing Silence: Academic Freedom, Palestine and the Criticism of Israel, a collection of essays by divers hands built in particular around the ways that the Israel lobby or Israel itself has sought to foreclose on dissent and boycott advocacy, frequently veiling such efforts with references to the need to protect academic freedom.  

On Thursday April 22, at 7pm, we are holding an online seminar to celebrate the book and its contributors.  Three of our colleagues - Arianne Shahvisi, John Reynolds and Yara Hawari - will speak on their work and there will be time for questions and discussion.     Everyone is welcome!

Zoom Link: https://tcd-ie.zoom.us/j/6576059321 Meeting ID: 657 605 9321

Enforcing Silence

Academic Freedom, Palestine and the Criticism of Israel

Edited by David Landy, Ronit Lentin, and Conor McCarthy

Situates the academic boycott of Israel in the broader context of academic freedom

• Overview
 
• Author Bio
 
• Table of Contents
 
• Reviews
 
• Details

Academic freedom is under siege, as our universities become the sites of increasingly fraught battles over freedom of speech. While much of the public debate has focussed on ‘no platforming’ by students, this overlooks the far graver threat posed by concerted efforts to silence the critical voices of both academics and students, through the use of bureaucracy, legal threats and online harassment. Such tactics have conspicuously been used, with particularly virulent effect, in an attempt to silence academic criticism of Israel.

This collection uses the controversies surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a means of exploring the limits placed on academic freedom in a variety of different national contexts. It looks at how the increased neoliberalisation of higher education has shaped the current climate, and considers how academics and their universities should respond to these new threats. Bringing together new and established scholars from Palestine and the wider Middle East as well as the US and Europe, Enforcing Silence shows us how we can and must defend our universities as places for critical thinking and free expression.

How horrible are academics, really?

The Minister for Higher Education Simon Harris (who at least is not quite as idiotic as his predecessor Mary Mitchell O'Connor, now mercifully excised from the Irish political scene) last year announced plans for new legislation on the governance of Irish universities.   The plan, presented as rationalisation (as so often), is to amend the Higher Education Authority Act (1971).   Elements of this proposed reform - hailed by government as the most important change to Irish higher education in 50 years - include a dramatic 'slimming down' of university governing bodies, the empowerment of the Minister to appoint a majority of non-university members to such boards, and legal structures to enable government review of university 'performance'.   

It's a sign of the sorry pass to which relationships between Irish universities, their academic staff and the state have come that such a proposal can even be considered.    The Minister betrays the profound ignorance of the nature of the university institution in general of his peers and his generation in the suggestion that universities need to be governed primarily by non-academic and non-university personnel.  And the posture of the universities shows how weak and ineffective scholars have come to be in representing their work, their interests, their contribution to society as anything other than the unwarranted privileges of whining irrelevant eggheads.  

The very 'idea of the university' is of a collective of independent and self-governing scholars.   Originally as in the case of the University of Bologna, widely reckoned the first university, the independence of scholars obtained particularly in relation to the Church and ecclesiastical powers.   Later, charters of independence were issued for universities by princes, prelates or the towns in which they located.  The first and most famous of these was the  Constituto Habita, adopted at Bologna in 1155, protecting the freedom of a travelling scholar, and conferring on such scholars freedom from reprisal and the right to be tried by their brethren.   This can be understood, therefore, as the foundational document of academic freedom, as we think of it today.  

The point here is that such freedom and the self-governance which flows from and protects that freedom, is fundamental to the notion of what a university is.   The difficulty, nowadays, is that universities have taken on the financial support of modern states and then more recently, as Western states have shrunk in the neoliberal era, universities have been encouraged to manage themselves as businesses and to seek and win the support of private capital.

So now in Ireland, we find the universities caught in a situation of structural contradiction.   The government seeks to enhance the power over universities of non-university and non-academic agents, both from the state and from private corporations, even as it withdraws funding from those same universities.   More control, less money.   

The control is potentially Stalinist in effect.   The government wishes the universities to be 'accountable' even as the monies thereby to be accounted for are becoming less and less.   This is not the first or the only recent government initiative vis-a-vis the universities which has authoritarian characteristics.   Last year, Ms Mitchell O'Connor announced the Senior Academic Leadership Initiative, which provides structures and funding for up to twenty professorships across the Irish university system, application for which will be restricted to women.   Efforts to achieve gender balance are admirable.  A scheme which allows government to reach into the heart of a university and shape the specifics of a core element of policy - recruitment - sets a very dangerous precedent.  

But Irish universities, even Trinity College Dublin, our oldest and most 'prestigious' university, where academic self-governance has been preserved more and for longer than elsewhere, are vulnerable to state meddling.   Academics sorely need to devise ways to explain and represent themselves to the society as a whole, showing that their activities - pedagogical, scholarly, experimental, critical - constitute an inestimable contribution to that society and need to be protected and respected as a public good and a crucial component of democracy itself.

An example of just how brilliantly such arguments can be made comes in the following blogpost by my friend and comrade Conrad Brunstrom, responding a few days ago to Minister Harris's latest announcements.  The link to his blog is posted here with Conrad's permission.   

How horrible are we? More sweeping reforms for academics to look forward to.