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”