secularism, elitism, progress, and other transgressions-- on edward said's -voyage in

8/4/2019 Secularism, Elitism, Progress, And Other Transgressions-- On Edward Said's -Voyage In

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Secularism, Elitism, Progress, and Other Transgressions: On Edward Said's "Voyage in"Author(s): Bruce RobbinsSource: Social Text, No. 40 (Autumn, 1994), pp. 25-37Published by: Duke University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/466794 .Accessed: 04/07/2011 16:22

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Secularism, Elitism, Progress, and Other TransgressionON EDWARD SAID'S "VOYAGE IN

In what has come to be called colonial and postcolonial studies, thereseems to be a gathering consensus that the institutional rise of the field issomehow an anomaly and an embarrassment.' To judge from recentessays and conference presentations, the best thing to do with its successstory, as perhaps with any success story, is to subject it to the mostscathing critique possible. A certain sarcasm about the field's sociogeo-graphical position, which seems irresistible even to observers who areotherwise quite opposed to each other, like Aijaz Ahmad and his manycritics, takes the characteristicform of a more or less personal belittling ofthe field's practitioners, identified as upwardly mobile in terms of boththeir place of origin (Third World) and their class of destination (bour-geoisie). According to Kwame Anthony Appiah, "Postcoloniality is thecondition of what we might ungenerously call a comprador intelligentsia:of a relatively small, Western-style, Western-trained, group of writers andthinkers who mediate the trade in cultural commodities of Western capi-talism at the periphery."2According to Arif Dirlik, "Postcoloniality is thecondition of the intelligentsia of global capitalism," and "the popularitythat the term postcolonialityhas achieved in the last few years has less todo with its rigorousness as a concept or with the new vistas it has openedup for critical inquiry than it does with the increased visibility of academicintellectuals of Third World origin as pacesetters in culturalcriticism." For"Third World intellectuals who have arrived in First World academe,"Dirlik argues, "postcolonial discourse is an expression not so much ofagony over identity, as it often appears, but of newfound power."3Such attacks on the field's metropolitan location and the power, priv-ileges, and priorities that stem from that location raise one immediate tac-tical objection: they forget that the legitimacy and the institutional toeholdenjoyed by such studies in the metropolis remain extremely fragile. It isoften claimed that critical attention to the (post)colonial deviously servesthe interests of neo-imperialism. Unfortunately, nothing obliges neo-impe-rialism to agree that its interests are so served, and there are no guaranteesthat it will think or act accordingly. Indeed, there are many signs thatpost-Cold War nationalism in the United States does not wish to recognizeits supposed interest in sustaining all those left-wing critics, many of themoriginally from Third World countries, who are teaching unpatrioticlessons to American youth. And if the tendency to delegitimate anddefund continues, the ultra-left paranoid view of the rise of postcolonial

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criticism will appear retrospectively to have been as misguided (to para-phrase Regis Debray) as Communist attacks on progressive French uni-versities on the eve of the Nazi invasion.4

Still, it should be possible to admit the partial truth of observationslike Dirlik's, it seems to me, without also endorsing the crushing conclu-sions that Dirlik draws from them about the illegitimacy and misguided-ness of postcolonial studies generally-conclusions which offer comfortand consolation to the field's political opponents. Yes, the existence of(post)colonial discourse does express "newfound power" as well as ago-nies of identity on the part of its practitioners. And so? Would this not bethe case for any successful intellectual movement, any movement thatwins provisional popular and/or institutional support for its terms andagendas, whatever the criteria of progressiveness it is judged by? Or havewe actually come to believe that any success in winning support is initself a fatal sign of co-optation, or evidence that the movement was neverprogressive to begin with? If not, then the failure to answer the many cri-tiques like this, indeed the seemingly masochistic tendency to repeat anddelight in them, would seem to indicate an incoherence at the point whereclass and (inter)nationalism intersect that is rather mysterious. And thisincoherence is also dangerous. For the lack of a vocabulary that wouldoffer (post)colonial critics some other articulation between nationalismand class also means the inability to represent themselves and what theydo in public. What (post)colonial studies needs, it seems to me, is not apolitical purge or purification (although, like everyone else, I have myown points of disagreement with various routine assumptions), but a dif-ferent and impious view of its own authority (such as it is), some narrativeof how it arrived at that authority, and some explanation of what thatauthority has to do with the transnational circle or sphere to which itholds itself newly accountable.This is more than I am presently prepared to do myself. But it iswith this task in mind that I would like to make some remarks about therecent work of Edward Said and in particularabout the distinctive versionof internationalism that clusters around his favored phrases "secular crit-icism" and the "secularintellectual."5Said is of course one of the few aca-demic figures in the U.S. who have managed to give public voice both toserious criticism of American foreign policy and, with more difficulty, tosolidarities that are not centered on or limited to the unquestioned prior-ity of the American national interest.6 Most remarkably,he has managedto defend the interests of the Palestinian national movement while main-taining an extremely skeptical view of nationalism as such. Indeed, per-haps the most crucial meaning of secular,in his usage, is as an opposingterm not to religion but to nationalism. In the interview with Jennifer

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Wicke and Michael Sprinker published in Sprinker's Edward 1WSaid: ACritical Reader,Said sets the "ideal of secular interpretation and secularwork" against "submerged feelings of identity, of tribal solidarity," ofcommunity that is "geographically and homogeneously defined."7 "Thedense fabric of secular life," Said says, is what "can't be herded under therubric of national identity or can't be made entirely to respond to thisphony idea of a paranoid frontier separating 'us' from 'them'-which is arepetition of the old sort of orientalist model." "The politics of secularinterpretation proposes a way ... of avoiding the pitfalls of nationalism."8Now the word secularhas usually served as a figure for the authorityof a putatively universalreason, or (narrativelyspeaking) as the ideal end-point of progress in the intellectual domain. In appropriatingthe word asa sort of insignia, then, Said clearly runs the risk of (in Tim Brennan'swords) "assuming the nineteenth century mantle of progress and enlight-enment."9Naturally enough, this usage has not gone uncontested amongcritics of Eurocentrism. R. Radhakrishnan,for example, objects in "Post-coloniality and the Boundaries of Identity" to how "'the secular' as awestern norm is made to operate naturally and therefore namelessly."10"What we have to realize,"Peter van der Veer writes in Orientalismand thePostcolonialPredicament,"is that the very distinction between religiousand secular is a product of the Enlightenment that was used in orientalismto draw a sharp opposition between irrational, religious behavior of theOriental and rational secularism, which enabled the westerner to rule theOriental."1'Meanwhile, the Subaltern Studies group has stressed the fur-ther connection between secularism and indigenous elites. Extending theargument from Western Orientalists to the secularism of Indian national-ist elites, Ranajit Guha argues, for instance, that the latter, "unable tograsp religiosity as the central modality of peasant consciousness in colo-nial India,"necessarily fail "to conceptualize insurgent mentality except interms of an unadulterated secularism."12Or, as Dipesh Chakrabartyputsit, secular nationalism in India has meant "an act of appropriationby elite(and elitist) Indians, on behalf of their project of building an Indian state,of diverse historical struggles of the subaltern classes."'3 The case againstelites and the case against secularism seem to be the same case.14

Having seen a certain ressentiment irected at his professional renownand his privileged position in an elite metropolitan university, Said showssome bravery in standing together with so authoritative a term as secular-ism. And, at the same time, his descriptions of the intellectual also try toevade this authority. As he says in the Wicke-Sprinker interview, his ver-sion of secularism is an attempt to avoid nationalism's us-and-them with-out, on the contrary, espousing what he calls "universal values." If hespeaks positively of "globalism"and "worldliness,"he says a distinct no to

The word secularhas usually served

as a figurefor the authority

of a putativelyuniversal reason,

or (narrativelyspeaking) as the

ideal endpointof progress in the

intellectualdomain.

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"cosmopolitanism and intellectual tourism," to any internationalism thatwould express a "superiordetachment ... a generalall-encompassing lovefor all of humanity."15 n other words, the word secular seems to aim at aversion of internationalismthat would do without the direct authoritativebacking either of a putatively universal class, as in the Marxist version, orof disinterestedrationality.Is it, then, a sort of postmodern secularism thatattempts to do without any authority?'6Here another implication of secular is pertinent: the suggestion thatthe so-called clerisy must learn to work without the quasi-theological guar-antees and quasi-theological self-conceptions that have served it in thepast. At the end of his final Reith lecture in the summer of 1993, nowpublished in Raritan, Said declared that "the true intellectual is a secularbeing. However much intellectuals pretend that their representations areof higher things or ultimate values, morality begins with their activity inthis secular world of ours-where it takes place, whose interests itserves."17Rather than some sort of exemplary otherworldliness, being asecular intellectual seems here to mean resigning oneself to an inevitableprofane untidiness, an impurity, a political incorrectness. Yet it also seemsto draw energy and authority from that refusal of virtue. And this is per-haps because, implicitly, it entails biting the not entirely bitter bullet ofinstitutional privilege. According to the OxfordEnglish Dictionary, secu-larism is "the doctrine that morality should be based solely in regard tothe well-being of mankind in the present life to the exclusion of all con-siderations drawn from belief in God or in a future state." If intellectualsshould be "worldly" or even "profane," at least partially subdued to theuntidiness of an unjust and hierarchicalworld, then perhaps they must dosome strategic acquiescing in institutional or professional hierarchies.The last lines of the final Reith lecture, "Gods That Always Fail,"goas follows: "As an intellectual you are the one who can choose betweenactively representing the truth to the best of your ability, or passivelyallowing a patron or an authority to direct you. For the secular intellec-tual, thosegods always fail." Add to this the refusal of all orthodoxy anddogma, of any "kind of absolute certainty" or any "total, seamless view ofreality," and you get a secular intellectual who submits to no authority,even that of his or her own beliefs or findings.l8 Given this somewhatdeconstructive thrust of the term secular-not just antinationalist butagainst any grounding of intellectual mission and activity-one wouldimagine that Said would be quite harsh with Julien Benda's Trahisondesclercs, a text that grounds its attractive antinationalism upon a shame-lessly sacred view of the intellectual. Surprisingly, he is not.19 On the keyissue of the clerics' betrayal,he comes down on Benda's side. Which is tosay that he implicitly endorses, here and throughout the Reith lectures,the sense of high vocation without which there could be no betrayal.This

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stubborn fidelity to an ideal of vocation is clearly one reason why hiswork is so moving to so many people. But it is all the more reason to askon what grounds, on what secular authoritythis sense of mission might bebased. The question is absolutely crucial, for it seems to promise a differ-ent differencebetween intellectuals and nonintellectuals, an articulationbetween the two that does not demand that the first simply dissolve intothe second, and at the same time an authority that is specifically anduncompromisingly internationalist.The secular ideal of the intellectual who "speaks truth to power,"which Said celebrates in Benda and elsewhere, pays no explicit attentionto the decisive question-the same question in another form-of whypower would listen, what might make it listen, what makes anyone listen.That is, it has nothing explicit to say about the source of counterauthoritythat intellectuals must be assumed to counterpose to "power." Thisabsence of critical or countervailing authorityis all the more evident giventhat the term secular functions elsewhere in Said so as to frustrate theusual answers to the authority question: the dogmatic authority of disin-terested truth and the authority of an ethnically purified local or nationalcommunity, as we have alreadyseen, and also the borrowed sanctity of theprofessionalcommunity. In the introduction to The World, he Text,and theCritic, entitled "Secular Criticism," Said mobilizes the term secularin anattack on what he calls, again from the theological lexicon, the "cult ofprofessional expertise," with its sense of "vocation" and its "quasi-reli-gious quietism."20What sorts of authority might there be, then? One hint comes fromSaid's most sympathetic words aboutJulienBenda, which suggest a sort ofeconomyof authority. Intellectuals, Said says, "have to be in a state ofalmost permanent opposition to the status quo."And this is why "Benda'sintellectuals are perforce a small, highly visible group." Here intellectualauthority would seem to come from the presumed rarity or scarcity ofthose willing to confront nonintellectual authority. It would come, that is,from a "rarefaction" of intellectuals-I borrow the term from Said's influ-ential appreciation of Foucault-that formally resembles the dread con-cept of elitism, but that offers the restrictiveness of the group an ethico-political legitimacy (the unusual courage needed for opposition to thestatus quo) rather than a meritocratic one. Or perhaps it would be fairertosay that rather than the profession deciding who is a competent scholar, itis power that decides who is a real intellectual, whose dissent is painful orthreatening enough to be worthy of public expressions of dislike. Theauthority of the intellectual is a faithful inversion of the authority of poweritself, and is thus dependent upon it. Here the amoral connotations of sec-ularism are not far beneath the surface. Practically speaking, an ethicalscarcity defined by opposition will be indistinguishable from a social

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scarcity that is a potential source of profit and prestige. An undesired vis-ibility, resulting from the political hostility of the powers that be, can andperhaps must be exchanged for celebrity, the prized, often apolitical cur-rency of honors and economic rewards.This line of thought seems interestingly continuous with anotheranswer to the question of where intellectuals get such authority as theypossess, Anna Boschetti's analysis of the success of Sartre. For Boschetti,Sartre's trick was to manage a transfer to one domain of cultural capitalaccumulated in another domain; thus Sartre brings the prestige of theEcole Normale Superieure and the discipline of philosophy to literature,and he then brings that newly accumulated sum to his political activities,the government's dramatic reactions to which feed back into his literaryand philosophical esteem.21 For all its problems, the concept of culturalcapital makes a valuable stab at quantifying and mapping such transfers,translatingan otherwise vague "guardianshipof the archives" into a diver-sified and dynamic economy of cultural resources. And this import-exportmodel brings out some distinctive features of-indeed, enables us to rec-ognize as such-the authorizing story of the intellectual that Said calls, inCulture and Imperialism,"the voyage in": the movement of Third Worldwriters, intellectuals, and texts into the metropolis and their successfulintegration there.From one point of view, this movement could obviously be describedas a form of upward mobility, and to these as to other such narratives,critics have reacted with various degrees of alarm. Can Third World fic-tions and careers that aim at and are embraced by the metropolis ulti-mately signify anything other than an opportunistic affirmation of themetropolis? Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, for example, makes a pointedparallelbetween the current First Worldenthusiasm for Third World writ-ers and the earlier divide-and-conquer strategy of colonialism, whichsimultaneously served the interests of the colonial power and of a native-born "aspiring elite." Do we see here again, she asks, "the old scenario ofempowering a privileged group or a group susceptible to upward mobilityas the authentic inhabitants of the margin"?22Faced with the collective bildungsroman of Third World writers whohave come to live and work in the metropolis, thereby repeating (with atransnationaldifference) the country-to-the-city journey so characteristicof the nineteenth-century Europeannovel, Said in contrast is rather cheer-ful. You can see the cheerfulness, for example, in his innovative treatmentof the novel of disillusionment. In an indirect reply to Franco Moretti'sdarkly Lukacsian view of the genre, Said appreciatively displays ThirdWorld reversals of Heartof Darkness, ike Tayeb Salih's Seasonof Migrationto the North. Moretti sees the genre dying when European men, losing

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faith in their own projects, have tired of it. Said's insistence on its contin-uing vitality in the hands of Third World men and women would appear,on the contrary, to express-in a wonderful corroboration of A. L. Mor-ton's view of utopian and dystopian fiction-the intelligent optimism of astratum or category that is still rising, energetic, confident of its powers.23

The grounds of this qualified optimism are clearly not that the storyof an upwardly mobile elite can literally be everyone's story. It's hard toimagine that American readers would react so favorably to Jamaica Kin-caid or BharatiMukherjee, say, if they thought the entire Third World wasbeing advised to emulate their upwardly mobile au pair heroines and headfor the nearest international airport.24Said's point, rather, is that the cen-ter can be and has been changed. There has been what he calls "adver-sarial internationalization in an age of continued imperial structures."25Opposition has arisen in the modern metropolis-an opposition there waslittle sense of in Orientalism. In the universities, the "impingement" ofThird World intellectualson metropolitan space has resulted in "the trans-formation of the very terrainof the disciplines." This implies, I would liketo add, that the story of Third World intellectual migration has conferreda certain authority upon oppositional intellectuals in and from the FirstWorld, including many for whom the work of representing colonial andpostcolonial experience must unequivocally bework, that is, cannot evenbe misperceived as a matter of simple identity. And all this has been pos-sible-this is the key point-because of the risky and unstable fusion ofpersonal mobility and impersonal representativeness: "Anti-imperialistintellectual and scholarly work done by writers from the peripheries whohave immigrated to or are visiting the metropolis is usually an extensioninto the metropolis of large-scale mass movements."26Let me offer a brief and schematic national contrast. In what I mightcall the French model of intellectual authority, as in Anna Boschetti andPierre Bourdieu, the sole source of cultural capital is existing institutions.Bourdieu's model of the "oblate," for example, describes the rewardsgiven to a poor child, without social capital, whose upward mobility hasdepended entirely on the educational institution that elevated him and towhich he responds with unconditional loyalty. Conservative reactionagainst disciplinary change often comes, Bourdieu writes in Homo Acade-micus, from "those I call 'oblates,' and who, consigned from childhood tothe school institution (they are often children of the lower or middleclasses or sons of teachers), are totally dedicated to it":

The "oblates"are always nclined to thinkthat without the churchthere isno salvation-especiallywhentheybecome the high priestsof an institutionof culturalreproductionwhich, in consecratingthem, consecratestheiractiveand aboveallpassive gnoranceof anyotherculturalworld.Victimsof



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The transnationalstory of upwardmobility is notjust

their elite status,these deserving,but miraculously ucky,"survivors" re-sent a curious mixture of arroganceand inadequacywhich immediatelystrikes heforeignobserver.... They offer to the academic nstitutionwhichthey have chosen because it chose them, and vice versa,a supportwhich,being so totallyconditioned,has somethingtotal, absolute,and uncondi-tional about it.27a claiming ofauthority but aredefinition ofauthority, and aredefinition thatcan have manybeneficiaries, forit means arecomposition aswell as aredistribution ofcultural capital.In short, progressis possible.

In this model, no authority is ascribed to the place from which the mobile"oblate" sets out; all authority is imagined to flow from the institutionaldestination. There is no possibility that the protagonist's initial povertymight serve in any way the (legitimating) purposes of the institution,nor-more important-that the protagonist's rise from that origin mighthelp change that destination in any way, or change the composition of thecultural capital subsequently transmitted to others.Said's "voyage in" narrative redistributes the emphasis radically.While it does not underestimate the continuing authority of metropolitaninstitutions, neither does it treat the composition of cultural capital asfixed once and for all or assume that to accept it is necessarily to offer thedonor unconditional loyalty in return. National origin matters; transfersfrom the periphery to the center do not leave the center as it was. Thetransnational story of upward mobility is not just a claiming of authoritybut a redefinition of authority,and a redefinition that can have many ben-eficiaries, for it means a recomposition as well as a redistribution of cul-tural capital. In short, progress is possible.

Ironically,critiques of postcolonial studies which declare their fidelityto Marxist orthodoxy also turn out to be those which, unlike Marx's, seemto preclude the untidily dialectical existence of progress. Arif Dirlik, forexample, agrees that success stories like this one must offer some answerto the crucial question of where the newfound authority comes from:"Merely pointing to the ascendant role that intellectuals of Third Worldorigin have played in propagating postcolonial as a critical orientationwithin First World academia begs the question as to why they and theirintellectual concerns and orientations have been accorded the respectabil-ity that they have." In Dirlik's view, the metropolitan success of ThirdWorld intellectuals that has given the term postcolonialits currency hasbeen "dependent on the conceptual needs of the social, political, and cul-tural problems thrown up by [a] new world situation,"that is, by changesin world capitalism. "In their very globalism, the cultural requirements oftransnationalcorporations can no longer afford the cultural parochialismof an earlierday"; they have "a need to internationalize academic institu-tions (which often takes the form not of promoting scholarship in a con-ventional sense but of 'importing' and 'exporting' students and faculty)."28The messiness of the word secular seems a necessary antidote to this

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invocation of world capitalism, an invocation which might be describedeither as overtidy or as theological. For Dirlik, global capitalism isassumed to be not only "organized" (a matter of dispute among Marxisteconomists) but ubiquitous and omnipotent; whatever happens expressesits will, a will that is undialectically unified and, in terms of its effects onThird World peoples, invariably malignant. There is no room here for acunning of reason that, to cite Marx's famous discussion of the British inIndia, could bring forth a certain political progress even from the worsthorrors of colonialism. It is hard to see how, within this worldview, anyprogress is conceivable that would not, upon its emergence, immediatelydemand to be reinterpreted as the result of capitalism's disguised butmalevolent intentions.

The common assumption for all of us who begin, in the study ofcolonial and postcolonial culture, with the intolerable facts of global suf-fering and injustice ought surely to be, on the contrary,that progress is anabsolute necessity. Of course, as Anne McClintock points out, the worditself is entangled with a history of racism and Eurocentric self-congratu-lation, and so too is postcolonial.29Of course, any historical instance ofprogress will obligatorily be compromised in any number of ways, as therise of (post)colonial studies is compromised by its metropolitan and classlocation. But this does not mean it is so contaminated as to be unsayable;we are not so rich in instances that we can afford to throw any out in thename of an ideal purity. For progress must be believed to be possiblebefore it can be fought for, and narratives of progress, including narra-tives of upward mobility, do just this work. Thus such narratives cannotbe disposed of by the simple thought that for most of the world's people,there has been no upward mobility. The incongruities between narrativesof upward mobility and the static or declining state of the world cannot becorrected by some voluntary gesture of self-discipline whereby narrativewould henceforth allow no image of fulfilled desire not statistically guar-anteed by actual improvement on the part of X thousands or millions ofpeople. For narratives, including metanarratives,are obliged to make useof desire, and there is no politics without them. As Alan Sinfield hasnoted, the rise of British "left culturism," including the careers of Ray-mond Williams, E. P. Thompson, and Richard Hoggart, was after all byno means an easy or inevitable fact of postwar cultural life; and theirlegitimation was secured in part by narratives of "upward mobilitythrough education," which was "a story that society, or parts of it, wantedto tell itself, not a record of experience."30Anyone who sees (post)colonialstudies as a ruse of world capitalism should be prepared to say that thecultural scene would have been better off without these figures, or that thecurrent scene would be better off without the equally contingent presenceof figures like Said, Gayatri Spivak, and Stuart Hall.

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In describing what he calls "the global cultural economy," ArjunAppadurai has distinguished between "finanscapes," or flows of capital,and "ideoscapes," or flows of ideologies and images. His point is thatthere is a "disjuncture" between these flows; no one of them (he provi-sionally distinguishes five levels) is a mere effect of any other.31 Noaccount of global capitalism can afford to forget this disjuncture, whichmakes a space for redistributions of culturalcapital that are neither simplymetaphorical nor simply epiphenomena of the real thing. I am trying tosuggest, a bit obliquely, that the new internationalism or multiculturalismof the academic left can be seen as one effect of a recomposition of cul-turalcapital-an effect that Said's "voyagein" narrativerisksthe charge ofelitism in order to authorize and legitimate. The power of anti-elitism,whether in Richard Rorty's denunciation of rootless cosmopolitans orelsewhere, depends, of course, not on refusingnarratives of upward mobil-ity but only on controllinghem. Said's "voyage in" can, I think, be seen asa courageous and well-timed effort to take back these narratives, to usethem in a different sharing out of intellectual authority. It is more thanincidental that, in so doing, it also offers an implicit answer to the enigmaof where the postcolonial critic's secular authority comes from. Theauthority of internationalism, according to this narrative,comes from thenational itself, or even from nationalism-though not everyone's national-ism, and not a nationalism that can itself be unchanged by taking part inthe operation.In the vocabulary of Abdul JanMohamed, we could perhaps say thatthe precarious but necessary authority that Said gives to secular interna-tionalism is founded on an ambiguous border crossing: neither simply anexile (which privileges the place of origin) nor simply an immigration(which privileges the destination), but both an exile and an immigration atonce.32 It is tempting to stress the Americanness of the optimistic narra-tive that Said thus counterposes to the French "oblation," and even tostress the legitimate pride one might feel in belonging, in this somewhatmodified version of John F Kennedy's words, to "a nation of immi-grants."33With all due gratitude, however, for the support that the U.S.thus offers to the multicultural project of changing the center, I wouldprefer to express my affiliation internationally,with the many otherwisesituated groups and individuals, in the U.S. and elsewhere, who take thissecular, progressive project as their own.

Notes1. In the interests of economy I will henceforth combine the two into(post)colonial. n the developmentand limits of the term postcolonial,ee EllaShohat,"Notes on the 'Post-Colonial,"' ocialText,no. 31-32 (1992), 99-113;

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and Anne McClintock, "The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls of the Term 'Post-Colo-nialism,"' in the same issue, 84-98.2. Kwame Anthony Appiah, In My Father'sHouse:Africa in thePhilosophy ofCulture(New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 149.3. Arif Dirlik, "The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age ofGlobal Capitalism," Critical Inquiry20, no. 2 (Winter 1994), 356, 329, 339.4. Regis Debray, Teachers, Writers, Celebrities: The Intellectuals of ModernFrance, trans. David Macey (London: Verso, 1981), 58-59.5. It would also be interesting to consider at least two of Said's idiosyncraticuses of secular,which have to do especially with scholarship: (1) the associationof the secular with a distinctively slowhistorical rhythm, the temporality of schol-

arship, and (2) its association with a sort of Weberian existential heroism ofscholarship, one that does without the usual versions of transcendent reassurance.6. See, most recently, Said, The Politics of Dispossession: The Struggle forPalestinian Self-Determination,1969-1994 (New York:Pantheon, 1994).7. Edward W. Said, interview by Jennifer Wicke and Michael Sprinker, inEdward W. Said: A Critical Reader, ed. Michael Sprinker (London: Blackwell,1992), 232-33.

8. Ibid., 233.9. Tim Brennan, "Places of Mind, Occupied Lands: Edward Said andPhilology," in Sprinker, Edward W.Said, 92.10. R. Radhakrishnan, "Postcoloniality and the Boundaries of Identity," in avolume forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press. See also WilliamConnolly, "Pluralism and Multiculturalism,"lecture delivered at the Bohen Foun-dation, February 1994: "But what if secularism remains, on points crucial tomulticulturalism, too close to the partner it loves to struggle against? And what ifthese affinities make their own contribution to the periodic return of violentChristian and secular fundamentalisms in western states? . . . Both the celebra-tion and the lament of the (precarious) victory of the secular underplay thedegree to which the Christian sacred remains buried in it."11. Peter van der Veer, "The Foreign Hand: Orientalist Discourse in Sociol-ogy and Communalism," in Orientalism and thePostcolonialPredicament:Perspec-tives on South Asia, ed. Carol A. Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer (Philadel-phia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 39.12. Ranajit Guha, "The Prose of Counter-Insurgency," in SelectedSubalternStudies, ed. Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (New York:OxfordUniversity Press, 1988), 81.13. Dipesh Chakrabarty, "The Death of History? Historical Consciousnessand the Culture of Late Capitalism," Public Culture 4, no. 2 (Spring 1992),52-53: "Nationalist history, in spite of its anti-imperialist stance and substance,shared a deeply embedded meta-narrative with imperialist accounts of BritishIndia. This was the meta-narrative of the modern state."

14. Another example comes from Faisal Fatehali Devji, "Hindu/Muslim/Indian," Public Culture 5, no. 1 (Fall 1992), 5: "Ideologically, I think, Hindunationalism has emerged as the only mode of resistance to the 'secular' state-indeed as the only credible, organized form of alternative politics in a countrywhere the ruling elite has appropriated secular nationalism so completely as toallow no room for dispute in its terms. Even the Left collapses into secular-nationalist attitudes when faced with a 'communalism' it is incapable of under-standing or dealing with apart from a largely irrelevant rhetoric of class conflict.Secular nationalism itself, in other words, has become a kind of state 'fundamen-



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talism,' a sort of self-legitimizing mode of coercion that ends up generating itsown nemesis in the 'communalism' it demonizes." Somewhat excessively, Devjiblames secularists for the creation of communalism. Like Rorty's claim that theparochialism of the academic left is responsible for the failure of a broader left inthe U.S., this is a form of covert celebration of left-wing intellectuals, for it holdsthem responsible for-that is, credits their power and influence to-matters farbeyond them, including the craziness of their enemies and critics.15. Said, interview, in Sprinker, Edward W Said, 235, 242. See, however,Chatterjee'sessay in the same volume, "Their Own Words?An Essay for EdwardSaid," which defends, within nationalism, the "many possibilities of authentic,creative, and plural development of social identities which were violently dis-rupted by the political history of the post-colonial state seeking to replicate themodular forms of the modern nation-state" (216).16. Note the uses of authority in Beginnings,vis-a-vis molestation: a coinagewhich is emphatically not anti-authoritarian. Edward W. Said, Beginnings:Inten-tion and Method (New York: Basic Books, 1975).17. Edward W. Said, "Gods That Always Fail," Raritan 13, no. 4 (Spring1994), 13.

18. Ibid., 13, 14. One's own beliefs and findings, in Said's view, quickly andinevitably harden into authorities.19. "Benda's examples, however, make it quite clear that he does notendorse the notion of totally disengaged, other-worldly, vory-toweredthinkers....Real intellectuals are never more themselves than when, moved by metaphysicalpassion and disinterested principles of justice and truth, they denounce corrup-tion, defend the weak, defy imperfect or oppressive authority."See Edward Said,Representations f the Intellectual(New York:Pantheon, 1994), 5-6.20. Edward W. Said, The World, he Text,and the Critic (Cambridge, Mass.:Harvard University Press, 1983), 2, 25.21. Anna Boschetti, The IntellectualEnterprise:Sartre and "Lestempsmod-ernes,"trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern UniversityPress, 1988).22. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Poststructuralism, Marginality, Postcolo-niality, and Value," in Literary Theory Today,ed. Peter Collier and Helga Geyer-Ryan (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990), 222, 224.23. Here I borrow from my review of Culture and Imperialism n Nineteenth-Century Contexts 18 (1994).24. See my "Upward Mobility in the Postcolonial Era: Kincaid, Mukherjee,and the Cosmopolitan Au Pair," Modernism/Modernity1, no. 2 (April 1994),133-51.25. Said, interview, in Sprinker, Edward W.Said, 244.26. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993),244.

27. Pierre Bourdieu, HomoAcademicus, rans. Peter Collier (Stanford, Calif.:Stanford University Press, 1988), xxiv, 100-101. Note the irony that the secularscholar can only hold to his institution with a religious irrationality.28. Dirlik, "Postcolonial Aura," 330, 354-55. Note the repetition of the oldcharge against cosmopolitans, leveled equally by Nazism and Stalinism, of com-plicity with world capitalism.29. McClintock, "Angel of Progress."30. Alan Sinfield, Literature,Politics, and Culture in Postwar Britain (Berke-ley: University of California Press, 1989), 234.

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31. Arjun Appadurai, "Disjuncture and Difference in the Global CulturalEconomy," in The Phantom Public Sphere,ed. Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: Uni-versity of Minnesota Press, 1993), 269-95.32. Abdul JanMohamed, "Worldliness-without-World, Homelessness-as-Home," in Sprinker, Edward W.Said, 96-120.33. It is interesting to note the historical usefulness of secular as a qualifierofmulticulturalism. Connolly, "Pluralism and Multiculturalism," writes: "Eventu-ally, of course, secularism emerges as a loose set of doctrines designed to preventstruggles between contending Christian sects from tearing the fabric of public lifeapart."


secularism, elitism, progress, and other transgressions-- on edward said's -voyage in

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