Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures
Edward W. Said
Language: English
Pages: 144
ISBN: 0679761276
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Celebrated humanist, teacher, and scholar, Edward W. Said here examines the ever-changing role of the intellectual today. In these six stunning essays - delivered on the BBC as the prestigious Reith Lectures - Said addresses the ways in which the intellectual can best serve society in the light of a heavily compromised media and of special interest groups who are protected at the cost of larger community concerns. Said suggests a recasting of the intellectual's vision to resist the lures of power, money, and specialization. in these powerful pieces, Said eloquently illustrates his arguments by drawing on such writers as Antonio Gramsci, Jean-Paul Sartre, Regis Debray, Julien Benda, and Adorno, and by discussing current events and celebrated figures in the world of science and politics: Robert Oppenheimer, Henry Kissinger, Dan Quayle, Vietnam, and the Gulf War. Said sees the modern intellectual as an editor, journalist, academic, or political adviser - in other words, a highly specialized professional - who has moved from a position of independence to an alliance with powerful institutional organizations. He concludes that it is the exile-immigrant, the expatriate, and the amateur who must uphold the traditional role of the intellectual as the voice of integrity and courage, able to speak out against those in power.
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Alliance, in which a consensus has emerged about resurgent or fundamentalist Islam being the new threat that has replaced Communism. Here corporate thinking has not made intellectuals into the questioning and skeptical individual minds I have been 21 have d iscussed this practice in Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1 9 78), Covering Islam (New York: Pantheon, 1 98 1 ) , and more recently in the New York Times Sunday Magazine November 2 1 , 1 993 article, "The Phoney Islamic Threat." 3.
Left-wing, independent intellectuals like the social commentator Irving Kristol and the philosopher Sidney Hook-brought with it a whole host of new journals advancing an openly reactionary, or at least conservative social agenda Oacoby mentions the extreme right-wing quarterly The New Criterion in particular). These forces, says Jacoby, were and still are much more assiduous at courting young writers, potential intellectual leaders who can take over from the older ranks. Whereas the New York.
Liberal and democratic society. But in spending a lot of time worrying about the restrictions on thought and intellectual freedom under totalitarian systems of government we have not been as fastidious in considering the threats to the individual intellectual of a system that rewards intellectual conformity, as well as willing participation in goals that have been set not by science 82 EDWARD W. SAID but by the government; accordingly, research and accreditation are controlled in order.
Served. The intellectual's representations-what he or she represents and how those ideas are represented to an aud ience-are always tied to and ought to remain an organic part of an ongoing experience in society: of the poor, the disadvantaged , the voiceless, the unrepresented, the powerless. These are equally concrete and ongoing; they cannot survive being transfigured and then frozen into creeds , religious declarations, professional methods. Such transfigurations sever the living.
Professions-broadcasters, academic professionals, successful public campaign to rehabilitate the Calas family's reputation (yet we now know that he toO manufactured his own evidence). Maurice Barres was a prominent opponent of Alfred Dreyfus. A proto-fascist and antiintellectual late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century French novelist, he advocated a notion of the political unconscious, in which whole races and nations carried ideas and tendencies collectively. 6La Trahison was.