Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures

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Summary: "Pertinent and timely for discussion today"
Review: A collection of six lectures given as part of the BBC's prestigious Reith Lectures, this short book contains Said sees the intellectual's role in society as that of a valuable outsider, one who can break down the stereotypes and categories that limit thought and communication. These thinkers are the ones that he believe can question special interests, corporate thinking, blind patriotism, even class or racial privilege. Above all, the intellectual is an exile and an amateur-that is, one consigned by choice to the margins. And one who can "speak the truth to power."

No stranger to controversy while alive, one cannot help but read biographical inferences in Said's essays. He chooses figure like James Baldwin, Virginia Woolf, Henry Kissinger and Jonathan Swift that resisted money or power to uphold intellectual honesty and rigor of thought. They are also individuals whom social transformation was an essential goal-much like Said. Regardless of one's attitude to Said's own politics, this collection of lectures given a decade ago remain imminently pertinent and timely for discussion today.



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Summary: Learning who is a real intellectual.
Review: Amazing! I have read this precious book several times, nonetheless, when I was reading what Said wrote about the Gulf War, I confused it with the War on Iraq. Then, who is a real intellectual? According to Said, not a person who conforms to whatever the Power offers, nor a person who does not hesitate to say that many other states do is (should be) good. A real intellectual seeks the third way.

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Summary: Representations of the Intellectual
Review: Edward Said is a distinguished professor of Literature at Columbia University. These are the Reith Lectures he delivered in 1993. He is a Palestinian Christian who has long been involved with issues of human rights there and around the world. Said deplores, here, the pressures and seductions of 'professionalism' on the intellectual in today's society. He describes these as coming from specialization, from of the cult of the certified expert as he calls it, from coopting by social, educational or political agendas, and, from commercialization, which sees all ideas as a product in a market, held to standards of economic viability rather than truth. The intellectual, he argues, must rigorously maintain objectivity and espouse activism. An attitude of being outside the conforming principles of associations, even those by which the individual is defining himself, is the impulse to conscience which is the key message of this thesis. The obligation of advocating for what is 'true' or 'just' is implicit with this. Authenticity and spontaneity in assessing these issues are instilled first by developing that moral sense, secular and flexible, and applying it in the context of broad learning. Those are compelling and challenging standards, which anyone who aspires to the intellectual, in character or understanding (and that should include all of us) must aspire. One can then differentiate this from the burgeoning 'intellectual industry' of today, traders in credibility, mercenaries for whatever paradigm happens to be ascendent and expedient. Said's own life attests to the influence one can have if honest to the concepts of universality, humility and integrity he discusses in these fine essays.

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Summary: High point in the history of the Reith Lectures
Review: Edward Said's definition of the intellectual as someone who "speaks the truth to power" is hardly an original notion. As any literate person will know, it recalls and derives from the Greek concept of the "parrhesiastes", the truth-teller. Crucially, not anyone who speaks the truth is a "parrhesiastes". A grammar teacher, for example, may tell the truth to the children he teaches, but he is not thereby a "parrhesiastes". However, when a philosopher addresses himself to a sovereign, to a tyrant and tells him that his tyranny is wrong, the philosopher not only voices the truth but also takes a risk. It is this element of risk and what we might call disinterested courage that defines a figure like Socrates but also a contemporary like Noam Chomsky. Of course, both the Greek notion and Said's concept, equally, exclude those who serve the status quo. Henry Kissinger is neither a "parrhesiastes" nor an intellectual. A merchant banker may utilise or produce "ideas" but he is too bound to the dominant system to be capable of truly critical thought. What this book addresses, though, is not so much the intellectuals themselves as the way they are perceived in different historical and social situations. What value does this figure of the truth teller, the risk taker, hold in different polities? In totalitarian societies he is paid the grotesque homage of censorship and state violence. In the U.S.A. and many Western democracies, by contrast, he is usually treated with contempt or barely concealed irritation. I have seldom seen "intellectual" used favourably in the British press. It is, all too frequently, prefixed with "pseudo-" or "trendy". What Said's book demonstrates is that the idea of the intellectual has an ancient and venerable history, and that power and truth are seldom comfortable bedfellows.

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Summary: Said's Slippery Slope
Review: Edward Said's earnest but flawed Representations Of The Intellectual (1994) is a shrewdly - argued, frustrating book that ultimately can only serve to further polarize its readership and reinforce deep prejudices on all sides of the political debate. Conservatives will have a field day with Said's subjectivity, dramatic sour grapes, self - martyring sense of his own "exile," and misappropriation of his own ground rules (he decries the West's use of the expression "Arab World," but repeatedly uses it himself; he warns against nationalistic pride, though he has written six or more books with either "Arab World," "Islam," or "Palestine" in the title), while those on the left will find his often unconsciously smug arguments soulfully moving. Sadly, Representations Of The Intellectual never rises above reflecting a second - rate thinker with a good throwing arm, one aimed right at the United States government for failing to perfectly fulfill Said's stringent humanistic ideals on a global scale, ideals he providentially sees as both the birthright and bread - and - butter of the born intellectual, a word - like "truth" - whose meaning he never makes the effort to define.

The badly - titled Representations Of The Intellectual is really only a salty mix of Prophet Against Empire with some To The Victors Go The Spoils thrown in to bolster Said's general sense of awkward sportsmanship. If Said has one loaded arm broadly aimed at the West and at the United States in particular, he holds an errant gun, squarely pointed at his own foot, in the other. Anyone irrationally arguing for the permanent application of universal human rights as social policy is bound to see vociferous dragons, red in tooth and claw, looming from hazy corners of the world map, whether they're genuinely there or not. The major problem with Representations Of The Intellectual is not Said's objective goals, but the childish, often depthless manner in which he rationalizes them and hopes to bring them to fruition. What caliber of argument is it to suggest that desiring a place at the victor's table is reason enough to be given one? If the victorious are generally awful, abusive, and corrupt on principal and always to be held in suspicion as Said believes, then why seek a place at their table at all?

For a proud and vocal advocate of both free thought and speech, Said has very specific, narrow ideas about the role and duties of intellectuals ("The intellectual always has a choice either to side with the weaker, the less well represented, the forgotten or ignored, or to side with the more powerful," "I think the major choice faced by the intellectual is whether to be allied with the stability of the stability of the victor and rulers or - the more difficult path - to consider that stability as a state of emergency threatening the less fortunate with the danger of complete extinction, and take into account the experience of subordination itself, as well as the memory of forgotten voices and persons"), which frequently reveal an almost absurd lack of insight into human nature, basic psychology, common sense, and the role these dynamics play and have played throughout history. Said prefers to ignore a world of intellectuals, from Sade through Lautreamont to Darwin, Emerson, Nietzsche, Freud, Frazer, Jung, and Eliot, whose intellectual worlds and traditions were remarkably other than those he scrupulously outlines here as absolutes and the only intellectual positions worthy of being esteemed and pursued.

Not surprisingly, one of Said's "heroes" has been Theodor Weisengrund Adorno, who he calls that "forbidding but endlessly fascinating man...for me the dominating intellectual conscience of the middle twentieth century." Though the sensitive, erudite Adorno clearly lived a relatively privileged and mobile existence, Said admires the "paradoxical, ironic, mercilessly critical" Adorno for "hating all systems...with equal distaste." Said's lengthy, unintentionally hilarious description make Adorno sound like a colossal, wailing, self - hating, wildly - projecting infant for whom personal responsibility and basic humility were fundamentally unknown qualities. The role that parental- and power- complexes may have played in Adorno's chronically neurotic existence goes untouched upon. Said seems to be suggesting that Adorno was an intrinsically helpless adult and not at the mercy of callous, inhuman Dame Nature, but of endless rancid social institutions and mercenary political machines. Said clearly has romantic admiration only for those who have nobly suffered in accordance with his own peculiar aesthetic of justifiable misery. Said's general perspective is sadly earthbound, materialistic, and victim - oriented.

Said may have faired better had he responsibly addressed his real concern - the Palestinian question - head on, as he has elsewhere, and abandoned the tortuous, if clever, circumnavigations and immature lapses into self indulgence he displays here. Tired readers are likely to come away from Representations Of The Intellectual with the impression that Said has a good mind but a fundamental inability to be honestly self - reflective and hold himself exactingly to the rigorous standards he requires of social institutions everywhere.

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Summary: The Intellectual's Role as Critic
Review: In this slim, yet thought-proking volume, Edward said attempts to provide an outline of the function and duty of the intellectual in modern society. Implicitly, Edward Said goes about the task of challenging the increasingly cozy relationship between the so-called intellectual, i.e., academia, and the political/military power structure that has developed in the wake of McCarthyism and the subsequent paranoia of the Cold War. Case in point, do you know where Napalm was "invented", not in the bowls of the Pentagon, but at Harvard University, by scientists (intellectuals) with a duty to expand human understanding and knowledge, not to be used as a means to power and destruction. That, Said would contend, is precisely the problem with the role of the intelelctual today. Au Courant the climate of the "expert" reighns supreme and almost completely in the cause of war--in whatever manifestation it is found. Unfortunately, this is a problem that has been ignored for far too long, obscured with baseless, yet effective, claims of a leftist domination of academia to which Said's subtle analysis provides a vitally important counter.
Using the example of intellectuals such as James Baldwin, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Viginia Woolf and Noam Chomsky as a model of intellectual vigor and concern for social justice, both in words and in action. In this vein Said offers a critically important meditation on the vital influence that such can have on public opinion and, more importantly, government policy. Thus, the intellectual in today's society, in Said's mind, has a duty and an obligation to be an agent of social and political justice--a radically dissident voice if need be--against the dictates of blind power.

For those who admire critical thinking, moral courage and a helthy respect for honest debate Representations of the Intellectual is for you. There awill always be those who seem to believe that ad hominem attacks and smear campaigns can replace critical thinking and objective analysis, both of which are only a substitute for intellectual vigor. Yet, many of his critics seem to be perfectly content with a system in which the main function of an intellectual is as a petty propagandist of pragmatic ideology, providing justification for the continued imperial wars of aggression, right-wing insurgency, political assasination and even genocide, carried out by Western powers since WWII. Those who ignore these facts are either grossly naive or recklessly misguided by their own historico delusions.
But, for those who want to get beyond the simplistic dualisms and vacuous black/white oppositions by all means, read Said's book--your view of the intellectual in Western society will never be the same.

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Summary: Excellent essay on the role of the thorns in society's side
Review: My personal favorite of Said's books.

For those who feel ambivalent about Said's specific political views, this book touches on them minimally. (Though, obviously, his thinking is informed by those views throughout.)

The general question is: What is the role of a true thinker in our times? If you believe the "authorities" (i.e., the New York Times, or Charlie Rose, etc.) they are just scholars or thoughtful observers with a public voice. The upshot is that the intellectual is nothing more than an ambassador -- a mouthpiece -- for received opinion (that is, the orthodoxy). Intellectuals are nothing more, in this popular view, than a kind of secular clergy.

Representations of the Intellectual skewers this notion, and beautifully. Said had a singular breadth of mind. In Representations, he draws on a expansive knowledge of disparate fields to offer a convincing picture of the intellectual as a reasoned, passionate dissenter.

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Summary: The social role of the intellectual
Review: Said paints a lonely picture of the intellectual: always on the fringe, always challenging the status quo, and always on guard against manipulative influences. It is a very personal portrait, and a (intellectually) passionate call for people to broaden their scope of knowledge and to put their ideas into action, to question what we shouldn't easily accept and to defend marginal groups that lack political power. If you think highly of the French intellectuals like Sartre and Camus, or any other modern thinkers, you may want to read this very short book.

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Summary: Remarkable.
Review: The 1993 Reith Lectures, compiled and adapted for print in this publication, are as close as Edward Said has ever gotten to writing a manifesto of his personal beliefs. 'Representations of the Intellectual' is a superbly incisive analysis of the social importance which intellectuals occupy. It culminates in an impassioned arugment for intellectuals to challenge common societal assumptions of what constitutes the norm by broadening their individual fields of interest and taking a greater interest in cultural and political history.

The Annales School historian Marc Bloch once described the task of social historians as entailing 'years of analysis for a day of synthesis'. This might well describe the extraordinary erudition of Said, who has always synthesised his encyclopaedic knowledge of politics and aesthetics - whether it be literature, classical music or the visual arts - into highly original works distinguished by their breathtaking interpretive ingenuity.

Said's critics, including the folks at 'Commentary', demur at the all-encompassing nature of his mind, to which the sheer quantity of his publications bears explicit witness. But as 'Representations of the Intellectual' demonstrates, Said views the role of the intellectual as being both public and professional; for him, it's a role which naturally occasions shared knowledge in a public domain.

Said is hardly Panglossian, though he is unapologetically idealistic, insisting that universities, even today, are a 'quasi-utopian space'. The Humanities have clearly changed in the last couple of decades. Said celebrates the emergence of culturally inclusive literary theory such as feminist and queer studies, which accord with his personal understanding of intellectuals as critically engaged individuals not afraid to question populist rhetoric and speak on behalf of hitherto suppressed or unheard voices in society. Thus he rails against political correctness on both Left and Right - here, he includes zealous theorists who are infatuated with esoteric jargon and language games - so that, as the final chapter of 'Representations of the Intellectual' proudly proclaims, they might 'speak the truth to power'.

Said's politics are uncompromisingly Leftist, and his vision of a world in which the vagaries of cultural difference are not merely tolerated but actively surmounted, only seems compatible with a multicultural democracy (which, Said realises, inevitably has its own share of problems. For example, he abhors the modern role of the United States as an ostensibly humanitarian interventionist. Utopia, indeed!) Yet he doesn't actively seek to change the world. Rather, he wants to fortfy intellectuals with moral courage by encouraging them to embrace their individualism and social importance. In the end, the fact that Said has a social vision at all is just as important as its potential to be enacted.

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Summary: Representations of the Intellectual
Review: The annual Reith Lectures, named for the first director of the BBC, have included fine and original contributions by some distinguished thinkers. Unfortunately, the 1993 lectures delivered by Edward Said marked the nadir of what was once an outstanding feature of British public life; they are published in this volume.

The lectures consist in Said's attempt to define the characteristics of the intellectual. Oddly enough, the criterion of being an intellectual appears to come down to whether or not you agree with Said's own political opinions. The intellectual, so Said says, is "unwilling to accept ... confirmations of what the powerful or conventional have to say". The intellectual's role is, according to Said, in the old Quaker formulation, "speaking truth to power" - which, put less pretentiously, apparently involves opposing the Gulf War (in which the United States, in a selfless act of solidarity with Muslims, reversed the illegal and brutal annexation of Kuwait), but does not involve telling the Palestinian Authority to crack down on the bombers of Israeli buses, pizza restaurants, discotheques and Passover Seders.

In short, this is a sanctimonious and self-referential work that does little to illuminate the process of critical inquiry but tells us something about the anti-western political agenda of its author. A useful corrective is Richard Posner's "Public Intellectuals: A Study in Decline", which notes the "off-the-cuff pronouncements, erroneous predictions and ignorant policy proposals" that characterise so much of what passes for contemporary intellectual discourse. Having read Said's "Representations of the Intellectual", I can see what Posner means.