EDWARD SAID : Culture and Imperialism
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Edward W. Said was born in Jerusalem, Palestine and attended schools
there and in Cairo. He received his B.A. from Princeton and his M.A.
and Ph.D. from Harvard. He is University Professor at Columbia. He is
the author of Orientalism, The Question of Palestine, Covering Islam,
After the Last Sky, and Culture and Imperialism.
I want to begin with an indisputable fact, namely that during the
nineteenth century unprecedented power, compared to which the power of
Rome, Spain, Baghdad or Constantinople in their day were far less
formidable, was concentrated in Britain and France and later in other
Western countries, the United States especially. This century, the
nineteenth century, climaxed what has been called the "rise of the
West." Western power allowed the imperial metropolitan centers at the
end of the nineteenth century to acquire and accumulate territory and
subjects on a truly astonishing scale. Consider that in 1800, Western
powers claimed fifty-five percent, but actually held approximately
thirty-five percent, of the earth's surface. But by 1878, the
percentage was sixty-seven percent of the world held by Western
powers, which is a rate of increase of 83,000 square miles per year.
By 1914, the annual rate by which the Western empires acquired
territory had risen to an astonishing 247,000 square miles per year.
And Europe held a grand total of roughly eighty five percent of the
earth as colonies, protectorates, dependencies, dominions and
Commonwealth, one of them of course being Canada. No other associated
set of colonies in history was as large, none so totally dominated,
none so unequal in power to the Western metropolis. As a result, says
William McNeill, in his book The Pursuit of Power, "the world was
united into a single interacting whole as never before."
In Europe itself at the end of the nineteenth century scarcely a
corner of life was untouched by the facts of empire. The economies
were hungry for overseas markets, raw materials, cheap labor and
profitable land. Defense and foreign policy establishments were more
and more committed to the maintenance of vast tracts of distant
territory and large numbers of subjugated peoples.
When the Western powers were not in close and sometimes ruthless
competition with each other for more colonies--and it's good to remind
ourselves, that the great Scottish historian of empire, V.G. Kiernan
has said, all modern empire imitate each other--they were hard at work
settling, surveying, studying and of course ruling the territories
under their jurisdiction. The United States experience was from the
beginning founded upon the idea of an imperium. The U.S. was founded
as an empire, a dominion state of sovereignty that would expand in
population and territory and increase in power. There were claims for
North American territory to be made and fought over with astonishing
success. There were native peoples to be dominated, variously
exterminated, variously dislodged. Then, as the American republic
increased in age and hemispheric power during the nineteenth century,
there were distant lands to be designated "vital to American
interests," to be intervened in and fought over. For example, the
Philippines, the Caribbean, Central America, the Barbary Coast, parts
of Europe and the Middle East, Vietnam and Korea.
Curiously, though, so influential has been the discourse insisting on
American specialness, altruism and opportunity, that imperialism in
the United States as a word or ideology has turned up only rarely and
recently in accounts of the United States culture, politics and
history. But the connection between imperial politics and culture in
North America, and in particular in the United States, is
astonishingly direct. American attitudes to greatness, to hierarchies
of race, to the perils of other revolutions--the American Revolution
being considered unique and somehow unrepeatable anywhere else in the
world--these have remained constant, have dictated, have obscured the
realities of empire while apologists for overseas American interests
have insisted on American innocence, doing good, fighting for freedom.
Graham Greene's character Pyle, in his novel of 1951, The Quiet
American, embodies this cultural formation with merciless accuracy.
Yet for citizens of nineteenth century Britain and France, unlike in
America, empire was a major topic of unembarrassed cultural attention.
British India and French North Africa alone played a tremendous role
in the imagination, the economy, the political life and social fabric
of British and French society. If we mention names like Edmund Burke,
Delacroix, Ruskin, Carlyle, James and John Stuart Mill, Kipling,
Balzac, Nerval, Flaubert or Conrad, we would be mapping only a tiny
corner of a much larger reality than even their immense collective
talents cover. There were scholars, administrators, travelers,
traders, parliamentarians, merchants, novelists, theorists,
speculators, adventurers, visionaries, poets, and every variety of
outcast and misfit in the outlying possessions of these two imperial
powers, each of whom contributed to the formation of a colonial
actuality existing at the heart of metropolitan life.
As I shall be using the term--and I'm not really too interested in
terminological adjustments--"imperialism" means the practice, the
theory and the attitudes of a dominating metropolitan center that
rules a distant territory. "Colonialism," which is almost always a
consequence of imperialism, is the implanting of settlements on
distant territory. As the historian Michael Doyle puts it, "Empire is
a relationship, formal or informal, in which one state controls the
effective political sovereignty of another political society. It can
be achieved by force, by political collaboration, economic, social or
cultural dependence. Imperialism is simply the process or policy of
establishing or maintaining an empire."
In our time direct colonialism of a kind of for example the British in
India or the French in Algeria and Morocco has largely ended. Yet
imperialism lingers where it often has been in a kind of general
cultural sphere as well as its specific political, ideological,
economic and social practices. The point I want to make is that
neither imperialism nor colonialism is a simple act of accumulation
and acquisition. It's not just a matter of going out there and getting
a territory and sitting on it. Both of these practices are supported
and perhaps even impelled by impressive cultural formations, that
include ideas that certain people and certain territories require and
beseech domination. For example, if you look at some of the writings
about India in England from the middle to the end of the nineteenth
century, you realize that India existed in order to be ruled by
England. As Kipling represented in his novel Kim, principally, but
also in some of the short stories, and he has Indian characters say
this, without the English, India would disappear. It would just not
the same place.
So that these people and territories require domination as well as
forms of knowledge that are affiliated with domination. The vocabulary
of classic nineteenth century imperial culture in places like England
and France is plentiful with words and concepts like "inferior" or
"subject races." Notions of "subordinate people," of "dependency," of
"expansion" and "authority." Out of the imperial experiences, notions
about culture were clarified, reinforced, criticized or rejected. As
for the curious but perhaps allowable idea propagated about a hundred
years ago by the English historian J.R. Seeley that some of Europe's
overseas empires were originally acquired by accident, it doesn't by
any stretch of the imagination account for their inconsistency,
persistence and systemized acquisition and administration, let alone
their augmented rule and sheer presence. As David Landes has said in
his book The Unbound Prometheus, which is about the industrial
expansion of Europe in the early nineteenth century, "the decision of
certain European powers to establish plantations, that is, to treat
their colonies as continuous enterprises, was, whatever one may think
of the morality, a momentous innovation."
The primacy in the nineteenth century, and through most of the
twentieth, of the British and French empires by no means obscures the
quite remarkable modern expansion of Spain, Portugal, Holland,
Belgium, Germany, Italy, Japan and, in a different way, Russia and the
United States. Russia, however, acquired its imperial territories
almost exclusively by adjacence, that is to say, taking territories
that are east or south of the actual borders of Russia. Unlike Britain
or France, which jumped thousands of miles beyond their own borders to
other continents, Russia moved to swallow whatever lands or people
stood next to its borders, which in the process kept moving further
and further east and south. But in the British and French cases, the
sheer distance of attractive territory summoned the projection of
far-flung interests. That is my focus here, partly because I'm
interested in examining the cultural forms and structures of feeling
which it produces, and partly because overseas domination is the world
I grew up in and we still live in.
The Soviet Union's and America's superpower status, which was enjoyed
for a little less than half a century, derives from very different
histories and from different imperial trajectories than those of
Britain and France in the nineteenth century. There are several
varieties of domination and responses to it, but the Western one,
along with the resistance it provoked, is in part the subject of my
lecture. In the expansion of the great Western empires, profit, and
the hope of further profit, was obviously tremendously important. As
the attractions of spices, sugar, slaves, rubber, cotton, opium, tin,
gold, silver, over centuries amply testify. But so also was inertia,
the fact that if you got there you would have to stay. The investment
in already going enterprises. Tradition. And market or institutional
forces that kept the enterprise going.
But there's more than that to imperialism. There was a commitment to
imperialism over and above profit, a commitment in constant
circulation and recirculation which on the one hand allowed decent men
and women from England or France, from London or Paris, to accept the
notion that distant territories and their native peoples should be
subjugated and, on the other hand, replenished metropolitan energies
so that these decent people could think of the empire as a protracted,
almost metaphysical obligation to rule subordinate, inferior or less
advanced peoples. We mustn't forget, and this is a very important
aspect of my topic, that there was very little domestic resistance
inside Britain and France. There was a kind of tremendous unanimity on
the question of having an empire. There was very little domestic
resistance to imperial expansion during the nineteenth century,
although these empires were very frequently established and maintained
under adverse and even disadvantageous conditions. Not only were
immense hardships in the African wilds or wastes, the "dark
continent," as it was called in the latter part of the nineteenth
century, endured by the white colonizers, but there was always the
tremendously risky physical disparity between a small number of
Europeans at a very great distance from home and a much larger number
of natives on their home territory. In India, for instance, by the
1930s, a mere 4,000 British civil servants, assisted by 60,000
soldiers and 90,000 civilians, had billeted themselves upon a country
of 300,000,000 people. The will, self-confidence, even arrogance
necessary to maintain such a state of affairs could only be guessed
at. But as one can see in the texts of novels like Forster's Passage
to India or Kipling's Kim, these attitudes are at least as significant
as the number of people in the army or civil service or the millions
of pounds that England derived from India.
For the enterprise of empire depends upon the idea of having an
empire, as Joseph Conrad so powerfully seems to have realized in Heart
of Darkness. He says that the difference between us in the modern
period, the modern imperialists, and the Romans is that the Romans
were there just for the loot. They were just stealing. But we go there
with an idea. He was thinking, obviously, of the idea, for instance in
Africa, of the French and the Belgians that when you go to these
continents you're not just robbing the people of their ivory and
slaves and so on. You are improving them in some way. I'm really quite
serious. The idea, for example, of the French empire was that France
had a "mission civilisatrice," that it was there to civilize the
natives. It was a very powerful idea. Obviously, not so many of the
natives believed it, but the French believed that that was what they
were doing.
The idea of having an empire is very important, and that is the
central feature that I am interested in. All kinds of preparations are
made for this idea within a culture and then, in turn and in time,
imperialism acquires a kind of coherence, a set of experiences and a
presence of ruler and ruled alike within the culture.
To a very great degree, the era of high nineteenth century imperialism
is over. France and Britain gave up their most splendid possessions
after World War II, and lesser powers also divested themselves of
their far-flung dominions. That era clearly had an identity--for
example, Eric Hobsbawm, in the third book of the trilogy of the Age of
Revolution, the Age of Capital, and the Age of Empire, talks about the
latter part of the nineteenth century. Yet, although the age of empire
clearly had an identity all of its own, and historians talk about it
roughly from 1878 through World War II, the meaning of the imperial
past is not totally contained within it, but has entered the reality
of hundreds of millions of people. Its existence as shared memory in a
highly conflicted texture of culture, ideology, memory and policy
still exercises tremendous force. Franz Fanon says, "We should flatly
refuse the situation to which the Western countries wish to condemn
us." This was in 1961. "Colonialism and imperialism have not paid
their dues when they withdraw their flags and their police forces from
our territories. For centuries the foreign colonists have behaved in
the underdeveloped world like nothing more than criminals." A proper
understanding of imperialism must take stock also in the present of
the nostalgia for empire, that is, you still find it in the writings
of French and English historians, for example, who regret the day and
the idea that we had to give India up, or that we had to withdraw from
Algeria. That still exists. And what also exists is the anger and
resentment it provokes, the memory of empire, in those who were ruled
and who see in empire nothing but an unmitigated disaster for the
native people.
So we must try to look carefully and integrally at the culture that
nurtured the sentiment, the rationale, and above all the imagination
of empire. And we need also to understand the hegemony of imperial
ideology, which by the end of the nineteenth century had become
completely embedded in the affairs of cultures whose less regrettable
features we still celebrate.
Thus I come to the present. Imperialism did not really end, did not
suddenly become past once decolonization had set in motion the
dismantling of the classical empires. A legacy of connections still
binds countries like Algeria and India to France and Britain,
respectively. A vast new population of Muslims, Africans and West
Indians from former colonial territories now resides, for instance, in
metropolitan Europe. Even Italy, Germany and Scandinavia today must
deal with these dislocations, which are to a large degree the result
of imperialism and colonialization as well as expanding European
populations. Also, the end of the Cold War and of the Soviet Union has
definitely changed the world map. The triumph of the United States as
the last superpower suggests that a new set of force lines will
structure the world. They were already beginning to be apparent in the
1960s and 1970s.
What are the salient features of the re-presentation of the old
imperial inequities, "the persistence," in Arno Mayer's telling
phrase, "of the old regime"? One certainly is the immense economic
rift between the North and the South, between the poor and the rich
states whose basically quite simple topography was drawn in the
starkest terms by the so-called "Willy Brandt Report," which is
entitled "North-South: A Program for Survival." It was published in
1980. Its conclusions are couched in the language of crisis and
emergency. It says that the poorest nations of the southern hemisphere
must have their priority needs addressed. Hunger must be abolished,
commodity earnings strengthened. Manufacturing in the northern
hemisphere should permit the genuine growth of southern manufacturing
centers. Transnational corporations should be restricted in their
practices. The global monetary system should be reformed. Development
and finance should be changed to eliminate what has been called the
"debt trap." The crux of the matter is, as the report's phrase has it,
"power sharing," that is, giving the southern countries a more
equitable share in power and decision making within monetary and
financial institutions.
It's difficult to disagree with the Willy Brandt Report's diagnosis,
which is made more credible by its balanced tone and its silent
picture of untrammeled rapacity, greed and immorality of the North, or
even with the recommendations of the report. But how will the changes
come about? The post-war classification of all nations into three
worlds, the First World, the Second World, and the Third World,
originally coined by a French journalist in the 1950s, has largely
been abandoned. Willy Brandt and his colleagues implicitly concede
that the United Nations, an admirable organization in principle, has
not been adequate. It doesn't seem today as if it is adequate, even
now, to the innumerable regional and global conflicts that occur with
increasing frequency: in Yugoslavia the United Nations is powerless,
largely because of the will of the so-called permanent members of the
Security Council, principal among them the United States.
With the exception of the work of small groups, for example, the World
Order Models Project, global thinking tends to reproduce superpower,
Cold War, regional, ideological or ethnic contests of old. Yugoslavia
is a perfect case in point. Even more dangerous in the nuclear and
post-nuclear era, as the horrors of Yugoslavia attest. The powerful
are likely to get more powerful and rich, the weak less powerful and
poorer. And Africa, of course, is living testimony to this fact. The
gap between the two, the North and South, overrides the former
distinctions between socialist and capitalist regimes that in Europe,
at least, have become less significant. Noam Chomsky concludes that
during the 1980s "the North-South conflict will not subside." I think
that's true also of the 1990s. "New forms of domination will have to
be devised to ensure that privileged segments of Western industrial
society maintain substantial control over global resources, human and
material, and benefit disproportionately from this control. Thus it
comes as no surprise that the reconstitution of ideology in the United
States"--and I would say especially after the Cold War--"find echoes
throughout the industrial world. But it's an absolute requirement for
the Western system of ideology that a vast gulf be established between
the civilized West, with its traditional commitment to human dignity,
liberty and self-determination, and the barbaric brutality of those
who, for some reason, perhaps defective genes, fail to appreciate the
depth of this historical commitment, so well revealed by America's
Asian wars, for instance." Chomsky's move from the North-South dilemma
to American and Western dominance is, I think, basically correct.
Although the decrease in American economic power, the urban economic
and cultural crisis in the United States, for example, I think a lot
of the discussion recently in America about the "canon," what is
Western literature, is connected to the reconstitution of ideology.
The decrease in American power and these various crises in the United
States, as well as the ascendancy of Pacific Rim states, like Taiwan
and Japan, and the confusions of a multipolar world have muted the
stridency now of the Reagan and Bush period. For one, it underlines
the continuity of the ideological need to consolidate and justify
domination in cultural terms that has been the case in the West since
the nineteenth century and even earlier. Secondly, it accurately picks
up the theme, based on repeated projections and theorizations of
American power, sounded in often very insecure and therefore
overstated ways that we live today in a period of American ascendancy.
Studies during the past decade of major American personalities of the
mid-twentieth century illustrate what I mean. Take the case of Walter
Lippman, the most famous pundit and journalist of the middle years of
the twentieth century. He represents the mindset of American
ascendancy and was the journalist with the most prestige and power of
this century. The extraordinary thing about Lippman's career is not
that he was correct or especially perspicacious in regard to his
reporting or his predictions about world events. He wasn't. Rather,
from an insider's position, that is, a man who stood near power and
always tried to talk as if he was an insider, he articulated American
global dominance without demurral, except for Vietnam, when he
disagreed with LBJ. He saw his role as a pundit to be that of helping
his compatriots to make "an adjustment to reality," the reality of
unrivaled American power in the world, which he made more acceptable
by stressing its moralism, realism and altruism with a remarkable
skill for not straying too far from the thrust of public policy.
What I'm trying to suggest is that the role of American power in the
world really depends not just on the raw military power of the United
States, which has given the crises in health, the economy, the
universities, etc., that flood the country. There is still a very
powerful ideological, cultural consensus in the country that suggests
in the career of people like Lippman that America's role is to be the
leader of the world. A similar view is found in the influential
writing of George Kennan. He is the author of the containment policy
that guided U.S. policy for much of the Cold War period. Kennan
believed his country to be the guardian of Western civilization. For
Kennan, such a destiny in the non-European world implied no effort to
be expended on making the U.S. popular. He called it "rotarian
idealism." But what it depended on was what he called "straight power
concepts." Since no formerly colonized people or state had the
wherewithal to challenge the U.S., this is all after the end of the
classical empires, nobody had the power to challenge the U.S.
militarily or economically, he cautioned restraint. Yet, in a memo
written in 1948 for the Policy Planning Staff of the State Department,
he approved of the recolonizing of Africa. In something he wrote in
1971, he also approved of apartheid in South Africa. He didn't approve
of its abuses, he said, but he thought the idea was a good. Although
he did disapprove of the American intervention in Vietnam, generally
he approved of what he called a "purely American kind of informal
imperial system." There was no doubt in his mind that Europe and
America were uniquely positioned to lead the world, a view that caused
him to regard his own country as a sort of adolescent growing into the
role once played by the British empire.
Other forces shaped postwar U.S. policy besides Lippman and Kennan.
Both of them were lonely men who were alienated from the mass society
they lived in, who hated jingoism and the cruder forms of aggressive
American behavior. They knew that isolationism, interventionism,
anticolonialism, free trade imperialism were related to the domestic
characteristics of American political life, which was described by the
historian Richard Hofstadter as "anti-intellectual and paranoid."
These produced the inconsistencies, advances and retreats of U.S.
foreign policy before the end of World War II and certainly after it.
Yet the idea of American exceptionalism and leadership is never
absent. After the British and the French disappeared, and certainly in
the period after World War II, when the empires disappeared, America
took over. No matter what the U.S. does, these authorities often do
not want it to be an imperial power like the others it followed,
preferring instead the notion of "world responsibility"--in my opinion
the same thing--as a rationale for what it does. Earlier rationales,
the Monroe Doctrine, Manifest Destiny and so on, lead to world
responsibility, which exactly corresponds to the growth in the U.S.
global interests after World War II and to the conception of its
enormous power as formulated by the foreign policy and intellectual
elite.
In a very clear account of what damage this has done, Richard Barnet
notes that a U.S. military intervention in the Third World has
occurred every year between 1945 and 1967. Since that time, the U.S.
has been impressively active on the world stage, most notably during
the Gulf War of 1991, when 650,000 troops were dispatched 6,000 miles
away to turn back an Iraqi invasion of a U.S. oil-producing ally. Such
interventions, says Barnet in his book The Roots of War, have "all the
elements of a powerful imperial creed ...: a sense of mission,
historical necessity and evangelical fervor. The imperial creed rests
on a theory of law making, according to the strident globalists like
LBJ and the muted globalists like Nixon. The goal of U.S. foreign
policy is to bring about a world increasingly subject to the rule of
law. But it is the United States which organizes the peace and defines
the law. The United States imposes the international interests by
setting the ground rules for economic development and military
development across the planet. Thus the U.S.-set rules for Soviet
behavior in Cuba, Brazilian behavior in Brazil, Vietnamese behavior in
Vietnam. Today, America's self-appointed writ runs throughout the
world including the Soviet Union and China, over whose territory the
United States during the Cold War asserted the right to fly military
aircraft. The U.S., uniquely blessed with surpassing riches and an
exceptional history, stands above the international system, not within
it. Supreme among nations, she stands ready to be the bearer of the
Law." Although these words were published in 1972, they even more
accurately describe the U.S. during the invasion of Panama and the
Gulf War, which continues to try to dictate its views about law and
peace all over the world. The amazing thing about this is not that it
is attempted, but that it is done with so much consensus and near
unanimity in a public sphere constructed as a kind of cultural space
expressly to represent and explain this policy. In periods of great
internal crisis, for example, a year or so after the Gulf War, this
sort of moralistic triumphalism is suspended and put aside. Yet while
it lasts, the media play an extraordinary role in "manufacturing
consent," as Chomsky puts it, in making the average American feel that
it is up to us to right the wrongs of the world, and the devil with
contradictions and inconsistencies. The Gulf intervention was preceded
by a string of interventions in Panama, Grenada, Libya, all of them
widely discussed, most of them approved, or at least undeterred, as
belonging to "us" by right. As Kiernan puts it, "America loved to
think that whatever it wanted was just what the human race wanted."
To complete this rather bleak picture, let me add a few summary
observations about conditions in the Third World. Obviously we can't
discuss the non-Western world as distinct from developments in the
West. The ravages of colonial wars in Africa, Latin America, Asia, the
protracted conflicts between nationalism and imperialist control, the
disputatious new fundamentalists and nativist movements nourished by
despair and anger, the extension of the world system over the
developing world--these circumstances are directly connected to
actualities in the West. On the one hand, as Eqbal Ahmad says in the
best account of these circumstances that we have, the peasant and
pre-capitalist classes that predominated during the era of classical
colonialism have dispersed in the new states into new, often abruptly
urbanized and restless classes tied to the absorptive economic and
political powers of the metropolitan West. In Pakistan and Egypt, for
example, the contentious fundamentalists are led not by peasant or
working class intellectuals, but by Western educated engineers,
doctors and lawyers. Ruling minorities emerge with the new
deformations in the new structures of power. These pathologies and
disenchantment with authority they have caused run the gamut from the
neo-fascist to the dynastic and oligarchic, with only a few states
retaining a functioning parliamentary and democratic system.
For all its apparent power, this new overall pattern of domination,
which is, in my opinion, a replication, reproduction of the old
imperial order, which developed during the era of mass societies
commanded at the top by a powerfully centralizing culture and a
complex incorporative economy, is basically unstable. Now I come to
the part about the counter discourse to imperialism. As the remarkable
French urban sociologist, Paul Virilio, has said, this polity [the
world in which we now live] is based on speed, instant communication,
distant reach, constant emergency, insecurity induced by mounting
crises, some of which lead to war. In such circumstances, the rapid
occupation of real as well as public space, colonization, becomes the
central militaristic prerogative of a modern state, as the United
States showed when it dispatched a huge army to the Arabian Gulf and
commandeered the media to help carry out the operation. In other
words, it's so unstable that if you feel threatened, if your interests
feel threatened, then you dispatch a huge army with this tremendous
logistical capacity and you occupy and fight a war. As against that
capacity of a modern imperial state like the U.S., Virilio suggests
that the modernist project of liberating language and speech has a
parallel today in the liberation of critical spaces: hospitals,
universities, theaters, factories, churches, empty buildings. In both,
the fundamental transgressive act is to inhabit the normally
uninhabited. As examples Virilio cites the cases of people who are a
counter to the imperial invader, whose current status is the
consequence either of decolonization, migrant workers, refugees,
gastarbeiter in Germany, they are the counter to imperialism, because
you have people coming from the southern world into the Western
metropolis and causing an instability at the center. The people whose
current status is the consequence either of decolonization, like the
migrant workers, or of major demographic and political shifts: blacks,
immigrants, urban squatters, students, popular insurrectionists. These
constitute a real alternative to the authority of the state. If the
1960s are now remembered as a decade of European and American mass
demonstrations, the 1980s must surely be the decade of mass uprisings
outside the Western metropolis. Think of the places where there were
mass uprisings: in Iran, the Philippines, Argentina, Korea, Pakistan,
Algeria, China, South Africa, virtually all of Eastern Europe, the
Israeli occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza. These are some
of the most impressive crowd-activated sites, each of them crammed
with largely unarmed civilian populations, well past the point of
enduring the imposed deprivations, tyranny and inflexibility of
governments that had ruled them for too long.
The two general areas of agreement nearly everywhere are that personal
freedom should be safeguarded and that the earth's environment should
be defended against further decline. Democracy and ecology, each
providing a local context and plenty of concrete combat zones, are set
against a cosmic backdrop. Whether in the struggle of nationalities or
in the problems of deforestation, global warmings, the AIDS epidemic,
the interactions between individual identity embodied in minor
activities like smoking or the usage of aerosol cans and the general
framework are tremendously direct, and the time-honored conventions of
art, history and philosophy don't seem well suited to them. Much of
what was so exciting for four decades about Western modernism and its
aftermath seems almost quaintly abstract, desperately Eurocentric
today. More reliable now are the reports from the front lines, where
struggles are being fought between domestic tyrants and idealist
oppositions, hybrid combinations of realism and fantasy, cartographic
and archaeological descriptions, exploration in mixed forms, the
essay, the video or film, the photograph, the memoir, the story or
aphorism of unhoused, exilic experiences.
The major task, then, is to match the new economic and social
dislocations and configurations of our time with the startling
realities of human interdependence on a world scale. If the Japanese,
East European, Islamic and Western instances express anything in
common, it is--and this is what I'm most interested in--that a new
critical consciousness, a kind of counterdiscourse to empire, is
needed. This can be achieved only by revised attitudes to education.
Merely to urge students to insist on their own identity, their
tradition, their history, their uniqueness, may initially get them to
name their basic requirements for democracy and for the right to an
assured, decently humane existence. But we need to go on and to
situate the identities of our students and ourselves in a geography of
other identities, people, cultures, and then to study how, despite
their differences, they always overlap with each other through
unhierarchical influence, crossing, incorporation, recollection,
deliberate forgetfulness, and of course conflict. We are nowhere near
the end of history, but we are still far from free of monopolizing and
imperial attitudes towards it.
These haven't been much good in the past, notwithstanding the rallying
cries of the politics of separatist identity, multiculturalism,
minority discourse. And the quicker we teach ourselves to find
alternatives, the better and safer. The fact is, we are mixed in with
each other in ways that most national systems of education have not
dreamed of. To match knowledge in the arts and sciences with these
integrated realities is, I believe, the intellectual and cultural
challenge of our time. The steady critique of nationalism from the
standpoint of real liberation should not be forgotten. For we must not
condemn ourselves so repeat the imperial experience, although all
around us it is being repeated. How in the redefined and yet very
close relationship between culture and empire, a relationship that
enables disquieting forms of domination, can we sustain the liberating
energies released by the great decolonizing resistance movements and
the mass uprisings of the 1980s. Can these energies elude the
homogenizing processes of modern life? Can they hold in abeyance the
interventions of the new imperial centrality?
"All things counter, original, spare, strange." That is a line from a
poem by Gerald Manley Hopkins, Pied Beauty. The question is, Where are
all these things? And where, too, we might ask, is there a place for
that astonishingly harmonious vision of time intersecting with the
timeless that occurs at the end of the last of the four quartets of
Eliot, "Little Gidding," that Eliot saw as words in "Easy commerce of
the old and new, the common word exact and without vulgarity, the form
of word precise but not pedantic, the complete consort dancing
together." To recall now, Paul Virilio, his notion of how you can live
in a world that is counter, original, spare, strange, in which there
are many different identities, not yours alone, and where you don't
want to impose one domination on everyone, Virilio's idea is what he
calls counter-habitation, to live as migrants do in habitually
uninhabited but nonetheless public spaces. We can perceive this on the
political map of the contemporary world, for clearly it is one of the
unhappiest characteristics of our age, to have produced more refugees,
migrants, displaced persons and exiles than ever before in history,
most of them as a corollary to, and ironically enough as afterthoughts
of, great colonial and imperial conflicts. As the struggle for
independence produced new states and new boundaries, it also produced
homeless wanderers, nomads, vagrants, unassimilated to the emerging
structures of institutional power, rejected by the established order
for their intransigence and obdurate rebelliousness.
To my mind, most recently the images of that obdurate intransigence of
not being accommodated to the old status quo are the four hundred
Palestinians on that hill in Lebanon. They were kicked out to a
country which is not welcoming them, and they haven't been able to
return to their own country. Insofar as these people exist between the
old and the new, between the old empire and the new state, their
condition articulates the tensions, irresolutions and contradictions
in the overlapping territories shown on the cultural map of empire.
There is a great difference, however, between the optimistic mobility,
intellectual liveliness and the logic of daring on the one hand, and
the massive dislocations, waste, misery and horrors endured in our
century's migrations and mutilated lives, most of them as a result of
empire.
Yet it's no exaggeration to say that liberation as an intellectual
mission, born in the resistance and opposition to the confinements and
ravages of empire, has now shifted from the settled, established and
domesticated dynamics of culture to its unhoused, decentered and
exilic energies, whose incarnation today is the migrant and whose
consciousness is that of the intellectual and artist in exile. The
political figure between domains, between forms, between homes, and
between languages. From this perspective then all things are indeed
counter, original, spare, strange. From this perspective also one can
see, as Eliot says, "the whole consort dancing together." And while it
would be the rankest Panglossian dishonesty to say that the bravura
performances of the intellectual exile and the miseries of the
displaced person or refugee are the same, it is possible, I think, to
regard the intellectual as first distilling and articulating the
predicaments that disfigure modernity: mass deportation, imprisonment,
population transfer, collective dispossession and forced immigrations.
For example, the tentative authorization of feminine experience in
Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own, or the fabulous reordering of
time and character that gives rise to the divided generations in
Salman Rushdie's novel Midnight's Children, or the remarkable
universalizing of the Afro-American experience as it emerges in such
brilliant detail in Toni Morrison's Tar Baby and Beloved. The push or
tension comes from the surrounding environment, the imperialist power
that would otherwise compel you to disappear or to accept some
miniature version of yourself as a doctrine to be passed out on a
course syllabus.
From another perspective, the exilic, the marginal, the subjective,
migratory energies of modern life, which the liberationist struggles
have deployed when these energies are too toughly resilient to
disappear, have also emerged in what Immanuel Wallenstein calls
"anti-systemic movements." Remember that the main feature of
imperialist expansion historically was accumulation, a process that
accelerated during the twentieth century. Wallenstein's argument is
that at bottom capital accumulation is irrational. Its additive,
acquisitive gains continue unchecked, even though its costs are
exorbitant and not worth the gains. Thus, Wallenstein says, "the very
superstructure of state power and the national cultures that support
the idea of state power was put in place to maximize the free flow of
the factors of production in the world economy is the nursery of
national movements that mobilize against the inequalities inherent to
the world system." Those people compelled by the system to place
subordinate or imprisoning roles within it emerge as conscious
antagonists, disrupting it, proposing claims, advancing arguments that
dispute the compulsions of the world market. Not everything can be
bought off. All these hybrid counter-energies constitute a
counter-discourse, at work in many fields, individuals and moments
provide a community or culture made up of many anti-systemic hints and
practices for collective human existence that is not based on coercion
or domination. They fueled the uprisings of the 1980s. The
authoritative, compelling image of the empire, which crept into and
overtook so many procedures of intellectual mastery that are central
in modern culture finds it opposite, therefore, in the renewable,
almost sporty discontinuities of intellectual and secular impurities,
mixed genres, unexpected combinations of tradition and novelty,
political experiences based on communities of effort rather than
classes or corporations of possession, appropriation or power.
Lastly, no one today is purely one thing. Labels like Indian or
Canadian or woman or Muslim or American are no more than starting
points which, if followed into actual experience for only a moment,
are completely left behind. Imperialism consolidated the mixture of
cultures and identities on a world scale. But its worst and most
paradoxical gift was to allow people to believe that they were only,
mainly, exclusively white or black or Western or Oriental. Just as
human beings make their own history, they also make their cultures and
ethnic identities. No one can deny the persisting continuities of long
traditions, sustained habitations, national languages and cultural
geographies. But there seems no reason except fear and prejudice to
keep insisting on their separation and distinctiveness, as if that was
all human life was about. Survival, in fact, is about the connections
between things. In Eliot's phrase, reality cannot be deprived of the
"other echoes that inhabit the garden." It is more rewarding and more
difficult to think concretely and sympathetically about others than
only about "us." But this also means not trying to rule others, not
trying to classify them or put them in hierarchies, above all, not
constantly to reiterate how our culture or country is number one, or
not number one, for that matter. For the intellectual there's quite
enough of value to do without that. Thank you.