Chapter-4

T h e W o r l d l y Text a n d t h e C r i t i c

The World, the Text, and the Critic is a great work of

Edward Said that serves as a key to his significance to con-

temporary cultural theory. The book reveals the emergence

of the methodology and the concerns which have underpinned

all his works. When we look closely at The World, the Text,

and the Critic, a more materialist and worldly Said emerges

than the Said of Orientalism.

The issues which stand out in Said's writings and which

distinguishes his critical identity from the colonial discourse

theorists are his concepts of secular criticism. By secular

criticism he means a criticism freed from the restriction of

intellectual specialisation. He advocates amateurism in in-

tellectual life. He passionately argues for the need for intel-

lectual work to recover its connections with the political

realities of the society in which it occurs. The connection

with political realities enables the intellectual to "speak truth

to power"(Said, Representations 63). For Said, the problem

with contemporary criticism is its extreme functionalism which

pays too much attention to the text's formal operations but

far too little to its materiality. The result is that texts become

" a self-consuming artefact [. . .] idealised, essentialised,

instead of remaining as the special kind of cultural object it

is, with a causation, persistence, durability and social pres-

ence quite its own" {The World, 148). The question of world-

liness is the question of writers' own position in the world.

For any text is constructed out of many available discourses,

discourses within which writers themselves may be seen as

subjects or may not be seen as the subjects. The author in the

text is a textual construction without therefore assuming that

nobody speaks to us in the text. Ultimately worldliness is

concerned with the materiality of the text's origin. Said says

that we should resist the assumption that literature is an inert

structure. He goes further to say that to treat literature as a

passive structure is to miss the important fact that it is an act

located in the world and divorce the text, which is a cultural

production, a cultural act, from the relations of power within

which it is produced. The real challenge for Said is to nego-

tiate between two attitudes to the text which in different ways

misrepresent how the texts have existence in the world. The

classical realist position sees the text as simply referring to

the world "out there". Such a view fails to take into account

the ways in which language mediates and determines what is

seen in the world by framing the way it is represented. On the

other hand, the structuralist-inspired position sees the world

as having no absolute existence at all but as being entirely

constructed by the text. This view would not allow for any

non-textual experience of the world nor for any world out-

side the text. Said negotiates these two extremes in this way:

I put this as carefully as I can—worldliness,

circumstantiality, the text's status as an event

having sensuous particularity as well as histori-

cal contingency, are considered as being incor-

porated in the text, an infrangible part of its

capacity for conveying and producing meaning.

This means that a text has a specific situation,

placing restraints upon the interpreter and his

interpretation not because the situation is

hidden within the text as a mystery, but rather

 159

because the situation exists at the same level of

surface particularity as the textual object itself.

There are many ways for conveying such a situa-

tion, but what I want to draw particular attention

to here is an ambition[...]on the part of readers

and writers to grasp texts as objects whose inter-

pretation- by virtue of the e x a c t n e s s of their

situation in the world- has already commenced

and are objects a l r e a d y c o n s t r a i n e d by, and

construing their interpretation. {The World 39)

This means that the text is crucial in the way we have a

w o r l d , but the w o r l d does exist, that the w o r l d l i n e s s is

constructed within the text.

The function of the critic and in a broader sense, the

public intellectual has exercised Said's attention throughout

his career. The paradox of Edward Said's location is some

thing which characterises his career. The world and its link

to the text and the critic is crucial to his perception of the

value of intellectual work. His view of the critics' role is a

radical attack on ivory tower specialisation found in academic

criticism and w h i c h r e m o v e s it more and more from the

political realities of contemporary society. He expounds

s e c u l a r c r i t i c i s m with a v i e w to d i s p e n s e w i t h a b s t r u s e

specialisation and the retreat of the intellectual from the

actual society in which he lives and operates. The secular

trinity he espouses-- the World, the Text and the Critic—is in

direct contrast to the contemporary theoretical approaches such

as poststructuralism. Said says:

We have reached the stage at which specialisation,

professionalisation, allied with cultural dogma,

barely sublimated ethnocentrism and nationalism,

as well as a surprisingly insistent quasi-religious

quietism, have transported the professional and

academic critic of literature - the most focussed

and intensely trained interpreter of texts pro-

duced by the culture—into another world alto-

gether. In that relatively untroubled and secluded

world there seems to be no contact with the world

of events and societies,which modern history,

intellectuals,and critics have in fact built. Instead,

 lA-1
contemporary criticism is an i n s t i t u t i o n for

publicly affirming the v a l u e s of our, that is,

European, dominant elite culture, and for pri-

vately setting loose the unrestrained interpreta-

tion of a universe defined in advance as the end-

less misreading of a misinterpretation. {The

World 25)

Criticism has retreated into the labyrinth of textuality,

the mystical and "disinfected" subject matter of literary theory.

Textuality is the exact antithesis of history, for although it

takes place, it does not take place anywhere or anytime in par-

ticular. The increasingly complex programme of contempo-

rary literary theory has left it less and less to say to the

society from which it emerges. But it has led also to an ex-

tremely sharp break between critics and th? reading public

because writing and criticism have come to be considered ex-

tremely specialised functions with no equivalent in every day

experience.

Criticism which takes no account of the situation of the

text in the world is an irrelevant e n t e r p r i s e to formerly

colonised peoples. The need for criticism goes beyond spe-

cific positions. He takes criticism so seriously as to believe

that "even in the very midst of a battle in which one is un

mistakably on one side against another, there should be criti-

cism, because there must be issues, problems, values, even

lives to be fought for" ( The World 28). This is in short the

function of the public intellectual. For Said criticism is, by

its very nature and function, oppositional as is the function

of the public intellectual.

Criticism is important to Said because criticism is the

key function of the concerned intellectual. The ultimate func-

tion of such a person is not to advance complex, specialised

theories but to "speak truth to power". Despite the prolifera-

tion of the ideas of equality and justice, injustice continues

in various parts of the globe. The task for the intellectual is

to apply these notions and bring them to "bear on actual situ-

ations" {Representations 71). Intellectuals, like the texts they

produce, are not theoretical machines but are constantly

varied with the complexity of their own being in the world. It

is this worldliness which gives intellegtual's work its

 H3

.seriousness.

The postcolonial intellectuals' role is to act as a reminder

of colonialism and its continuing effects as well as to clarify

and expand the space which postcolonial societies have been

able to project for themselves. Exile is, for Said, a profoundly

ambivalent state, for it is an almost necessary condition for

. true critical worldliness. Exile can be a condition of pro-

found creative empowerment.

Over the years in which most of the essays in The World,

the Text, and the Critic were written (1969-1981), the pain

of exile from origin, tradition and home culture that stirs

modern critical consciousness has occupied much of Said's

attention. This collection exhibits some remarkably success-

ful treatments of nostalgias old and new. Yet it does not

simply teach us to adapt to life without homesickness. As a

displaced member of a displaced people Said is manifestly too

aware of the psychological and political cost of displacement

to exult in unachoredness. The intellectual adventure of his

work sets off from this double and discrepant awareness, which

energises the definitions of criticism that is at issue in

almost all of these essays. If criticism is not to be submitted

to the interest of the homeland. Said suggests, it can only be

located in dislocation itself, in the always shifting, always

empty space "between culture and system" ( Said The World

178). But he also argues that if criticism is not to withdraw

into harmless seclusion, it must accept the taint and constraint

of placement in the world and even perhaps make a home for

itself there. Between homelessness and worldliness there is

nothing so satisfying as a choice or a contradiction. The

World, the Text, and the Critic describes a criticism that is

ideally u n s i t u a t e d , both u p r o o t e d and u p r o o t i n g , a n e w

perception of the ease with which the homeless can settle

down, generating significant ambivalence in the realm of lit-

erary theory as well.

Modernist exile is now at home in the academy:

that is the state of affairs that calls for a turn to worldliness.

In Beginnings criticism was told that its epistemological and

narrative paradigms were those of nineteenth century realism

and that it should re-tool itself so as to recuperate " the meth-

odological vitality of modernism " {Beginnings 376).

 t45

In The World, the Text and the Critic, criticism is told that it

already is modernist, and that it "has achieved its method-

ological independence by forfeiting an active situation in

the world " {The World 146).

This conclusion accompanies a new scheme of recent

intellectual history hinging on the term "affiliation". In the

careers of modernist writers like J o y c e , Eliot, Freud and

Lukacs, Said conceives a three step pattern: (1) an initial break

with natural fllation-the unchosen, almost biological relation-

ships enmeshing the individual in a given culture leads to

(2) a "pressure to produce new and different ways of conceiv-

ing human relationships", artificial and compensatory social

bonds which now however assume (3) all the authority of the

old, flliative order, becoming— "no less orthodox and domi-

nant than culture i t s e l f . {The Worldl6, 20)

In " T r a v e l l i n g T h e o r y " , a p a r t i c u l a r l y provocative

essay, there are voyages in two directions. The first is the

passage of theory from Europe to America which usefully

expels traditional criticism from its "orderly inhabitable and

hospitable structure" and forces it "out in the cold" or "in the

 wilderness" (227,229). /^b

The second, however goes from revolutionary action to

scholarly routine. Said makes a visible effort to qualify his

impatience with theory that works only to "shake up a few

professors of literature" (238). The argument of "Travelling

rheory" is that the meaning of theory is situational; ideas

cannot be understood as universal or cosmopolitan but only

as specific to their location.

Said's two brilliant essays on Swift pivots on a modest

efficacy of the local. Swift's fairly strict, not to say uninter-

esting conservative philosophy is declared immaterial and

replaced by a picture of Swift the activist. "Too many claims

are made for Swift as a moralist or a thinker who peddled one

or another final view of human nature whereas not enough

claims are made for Swift as a local activist, as columnist, a

pamphleteer and caricaturist" (77)Said complains. Said re-

d e e m s Swift from T o r y i s m u s i n g t h e c a t e g o r y of t h e

"local". As an example of pure localism Swift becomes "per-

haps the most worldly" of writers (88). Said's intense atten-

tion to the writing lives of scholars like Auerbach and

 Lukacs, Ramond Williams and Foucault, Renan and Massignon

which makes up some of the most extraordinary pages in the

book seem intended above all to restore the just dignity of

».
intellectual labour.

As William D Hart observes. Said has always been a

Trojan horse in the poststructuralist, postmodernist city. Said

expresses his suspicion of those who are suspicious of truth,

of those who describe themselves as poststructuralists or

[Link] is a high modernist w h o is neither a

poststructuralist nor anti-poststrucuralist. He is ambivalent

- a n in-house critic, an exiled admirer. While sceptical of naive

notions of truth he is equally sceptical of the notion that truth

is "endlessly deferred" or the notion that the former is a mask

for the latter. ( 1 1 6 )

Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida are exhibits in

Said's case against repressed religiosity : they re-imprison the

secular subject in sacred categories such as " p o w e r " and "dif-

ference". To Said linguistic turn in philosophy and theory is

the ascendancy of the notion of textuality. On Said's view

textuality is a denial of history, a flight from circumstantial

realities, a descent into the abyss of meaninglessness, para-

dox and undecidability. Textuality is the antithesis and

displacement of history. According to Said contemporary

l i t e r a r y t h e o r y o p e r a t e s in an a h i s t o r i c a l l a b y r i n t h of

intertextuality.

Theory " has isolated textuality from the circumstances,

events, the physical senses that made it possible and render it

intelligible as the result of human work" (Said, The World '\).

In contrast secular, worldly reality based forms of critique

foreground the circumstances under which agents produce texts

and structures of meaning. In short, secular criticism accents

history. Said wants to distinguish the worldliness of secular

criticism from the other worldliness of poststrucuralism and

postmodernism, " from aporias and unthinkable paradoxes of

a text" {The World, 4). By invoking the reality or history he

can highlight the other worldliness of post discourses, where

the transactional relations of textuality and the world are de-

nied.

Said a c k n o w l e d g e s the c o n t r i b u t i o n s of the French

inspired critical discourses. They helped American critics to

 14^

challenge a university system dominated by positivism, deter-

minism, bourgeois humanism and the rigidities of disciplin-

ary specialisation ( Said, The World, 3). Unfortunately these

theories never took well to American soil but they changed

into degraded forms. Said calls this phenomenon "travelling

theory." This is the transformation that theory undergoes when

t r a n s p l a n t e d from one set of h i s t o r i c a l c i r c u m s t a n c e s to

another. The distinctive circumstances of post-World War II

France, that made structuralist and poststructuralist theories

seem appropriate were different from those in the United

States. The American appropriation of French theory took

place against a cultural backdrop that lacked historical

memories of the specific intellectual and social struggles that

made these theories seem natural. American appropriation of

French theory seems artificial and dismally ineffective.

If textuality, as Said sees it, is the problem then world-

liness is the solution. Worldliness, which means roughly the

same thing as reality and history, sets constraints on interpre-

tation and reference. Said contrasts this notion with the claim

that interpretation is limitless. Secular criticism avoids both

 \!)0
the mindless conformities of culture and the other worldli-

ness of system. This brings us again to Derrida and Foucault

who illustrate this point. Said's position toward Derrida

and Foucault has become less enthusiastic and increasingly

negative as the essays in The World, the Text, and the Critic

testifies:

If everything in a text is always open equally to

suspicion and to affirmation, then the difference

between one class interest and another, and one

ideology and another are virtual in—but never cru-

cial to making decisions about—the finally rec-

onciling element of textuality (Said, The World,

214)

Said is here making a simple point: that the sceptical

play of textuality does not allow us to make the political and

ethical distinctions that we want to make. Said's criticism of

Derridean textuality is an analogue to his later criticism of

Foucault's all-encompassing notion of power.

The World, the Text and the Critic begins with

"Secular Crticism" and concludes with "Religious Criticism".

This book can be considered as a dossier that contains the

spirit and broad outline of Said's cultural critique. These

essays have a special place in analysing Said's cultural

writings.

In "Secular Criticism" Said speaks of the humanist

scholar Erich Auerbach and his Nazi-enforced exile in Istanbul.

From Istanbul without the benefit of a library, he wrote

Mimesis, one of the most influential books in Western litera-

ture. According to Said Auerbach's exile, his national and

cultural homelessness and the cosmopolitan spirit that it pro-

duced made Mimesis possible. But the freedom and critical

distance that are available in a condition of exile and

homelessness are always threatened by dogmatic powers of

culture. Culture saturates everything within its purview. But

it does so by separating the best from the ordinary, the normal

from the abnormal, the insider from the outsider. Culture

includes and excludes simultaneously in its operation. Said

says:

[. . .] in the transition and persistence of a cul-

ture there is a continual process of reinforcement

 15^
by which, the hegemonic culture will add to

itself the prerogatives given it by its sense of

national identity, its power as an implement, ally

or a branch of the state, its Tightness, its exterior

forms and assertions of itself: and most impor-

tant, by its vindicated power as a victor over

everything not itself (Said, The World, 14),

This process inspires resistance, the most important of

which is offered by the intellectual, the isolated individual

consciousness. In this concept Said is torn between the

solitary Romantic individualist, Julian Benda like intellec-

tual and Antonio Gramsci's organic intellectual who is a com-

ponent of larger social organism. The task of this intellec-

tual is to resist the authority of culture supported by known

powers and acceptable values protected against the outside

world. Having described the task of the critical intellectual

Said then provides a detailed account of "filiation" and

"affiliation" which he claims are at the heart of critical

consciousness. Filiation refers to those natural or cultural

relations such as biological procreation and kinship that are

 1^'t-
authoritative and pre-critical. Affiliation refers to those

relations that compensate for and criticise the failure of filial

relations. Said takes T.S Eliot's conversion from Protestant-

ism to Anglicanism and the changes that occur in his poetry

from Prufrock, Gerontion and The Wasteland to Ash Wednes-

day and The Four Quartets as exemplary of the shift from

filiation to affiliation. This leads to n e w direction in his

poetry, which is consummated by the essays in After Strange

Gods. This poetry and these essays and his conversion to

Anglo-Catholicism are compensatory affiliations for the failed

filial pieties of Eliot's earlier Republicanism, Romanticism

and Protestantism. N o w he has changed toRoyalism ,Classi-

cism and Catholicism. According to Said there are two for-

midable temptations the critic must avoid: one is the culture

to which critics are bound filiatively. The other is a method

or system acquired affiliatively. The failure to resist these

temptations is what Said calls religious criticism. It is an

agent of closure which blocks the road of enquiry. Religion

and culture are similar in that both provide systems of au-

thority and canons of order. Said thinks of secularism as

«
religion abolished. Secular criticism as Said conceives it, is

the other of religious criticism, without the counterpoint of

religious criticism, it has no point. With Said secularism is a

term of approbation and religion is a term of disapprobation.

Thus dogmatism, obscurantism and jargon ridden language

are religious as are ideas and social relations such as nation-

alism, orientalism and imperialism. Said construes secular-

ism as public suspicion, exclusion and trivialisation of reli-

gious matters.

In 1993 Said gave the Reith lectures on the subject "Rep-

resentations of the Intellectual". This prestigious lecture

series was inaugurated in 1948 by Bertrand Russel. Said took

these lectures as an occassion to address the relations between

the intellectual life and society. He takes two extreme

examples of Gramsci and Benda to illustrate the nature and

role of intellectuals in society. Two of the most famous twen-

tieth century descriptions of intellectuals are fundamentally

opposed on the point that intellectuals are a very large or an

extremely small and highly selective group. Antonio Gramsci,

the Italian Marxist, and brilliant political philosopher.

was imprisoned by Mussolini b e t w e e n l 9 2 6 and 1937. He

wrote in his Prison Note Books that "all men are intellectu-

als, one could therefore say, but not all men have in society

the function of intellectuals"(in Said Representations! ).

Those who perform intellectual function in society, Gramsci

tries to show, can be divided into two types: first, traditional

intellectuals such as teachers, priests, and administrators who

continue to do the same thing from generation to generation;

and second, organic intellectuals who are directly connected

to classes or enterprises that use intellectuals to organise in-

terests, gain more power and get more control. Thus Gramsci

says that the organic intellectual is someone who in a demo-

cratic society tries to gain the consent of potential customers,

win approval, marshal consumer or voter approval.

Gramsci believed that organic intellectuals are actively

involved in society, that is, they constantly try to change minds

unlike the traditional intellectuals who do the same kind of

work year in and year out. At the other extreme there is Julian

Benda's celebrated definition of intellectuals as a tiny band

of supergifted and morally endowed philosopher kings who

 \'Jb

constitute the conscience of mankind. The measure of Benda's

intellectual is their willingness to "risk being burnt at the

stake, ostracised or crucified" (Said, Representations 5)

Said construes Gramsci and Benda as representing the

extremes when it comes to identifying intellectuals as a class.

For Gramsci an intellectual is anyone who works with ideas.

While everyone has intellectual capacities not everyone

functions as an intellectual. In contrast Benda describes the

intellectual as a member of a learned and moral elite. As Said

notes, intellectuals can be organic to reactionary or progres-

sive groups, groups that elaborate the status quo or insurgent

groups. In either case organic intellectuals are partisans for a

particular cause which makes them very different from Benda's

intellectuals who view themselves as non-partisans serving

pure truth and justice.

Said distances himself from Benda somewhat when he

claims that Gramsci's notion of the intellectual is much closer

to the reality than anything Benda gives us, particularly, in

the late twentieth century. Most intellectuals can fairly be

described as functionaries of various types: as academics.

 151

journalists, managers, bureaucrats and so on. He refers to

such intellectuals disparagingly as "professional". Said

asserts the following: "it is the intellectual as a representa-

tive figure that matters—someone who visibly represents a

standpoint of some kind, and someone who makes articulate

representations to his or her public despite all sorts of barri-

ers" (Said, Representations 10).

Edward W. Said's The World, the Text, and the Critic

gathers essays written from 1969 to 1981 on a wide range of

subjects and develops theoretical, critical and political themes

that Said has previously treated in Beginnings: Intention and

Method (1975) and Covering Islam (1981). It includes a long

introductory chapter on "secular criticism", a suggestive ac-

count of the "worldly" bearing of literary and critical texts,

two studies of Swift as "Tory anarchist" and intellectual,

several appraisals of contemporary literary theory, a critique

of the writing of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, an

a p p r e c i a t i o n of Raymond S c h w a b ' s La Renaissance

Orientale. But The World, the Text, and the Critic is much

more than a a collection of e s s a y s , and its unifying

arguments about criticism,theory literary study and intellec-

tual life are its most provocative feature.

Said contends that literary critics and teachers are dis-

gracefully "silent" about socety, history, and politics. They

do not relate texts to the urgent concerns of the modern world

and thus execute a policy of non-interference. The boom in

literary theory should not deceive us into thinking that criti-

cism and pedagogy are now acquiring a new vitality and pur-

posefulness, Said emphasises. "Theory" endorses and exalts

"non-interference", for its advocates refuse to connect

'textuality' to the worldly and circumstantial. Said's indict-

ment even extends to the Marxist and leftist theories which he

describes as being primarily "academic" specialties, not true

forms of political engagement.

Said sees the self-isolating business of literary study to

be in complicity with disturbing trends on the American scene

- 'the ascendancy of Reagnism', increased militarism and

defence spending and a massive turn to the right on social and

economic questions. "Criticism" is both powerful and pow-

erless. It is an effective force in furthering the aims of

colonialism, imperialism, and exploitation precisely because

it is unable and unwilling to confront and scrutinize them

and is content to remain exclusively "textual" in its orienta-

tion. In Said's view, criticism today is all too often little

more than a privileged encounter between reader and canoni-

cal masterpieces. It is basically:

an institution for publicly affirming the values

of our, that is, European, dominant elite culture,

and for privately setting loose the unrestrained

interpretation of a universe defined in advance

as the endless misreading of a misinterpretation.

The result has been the regulated, not to say cal-

culated, irrelevance of criticism, except as an

adornment to what the powers of modern indus-

trial society transact: the hegemony of militarism

and a new cold war, the depoliticisation of the

citizenry, the overall compliance of the intellec-

tual class to which critics belong. {The World 25)

To counter this sorry state of affairs. Said stresses that

we should affirm the relation b e t w e e n texts and the

existential actualities of human life, politics, societies and

events. We must also enlarge the domain of the texts that we

teach and criticise, recognising that literature is connected

to, implicated in, and intersected by many other types of writ-

ing. Above all, Said insists that we should uphold and refine

"critical consciousness". This "consciousness" is sceptical,

secular, alert to its own limitation, and is always seeking to

arrive at some acute sense of what p o l i t i c a l , social and

human values are entailed in the reading, production, and

t r a n s m i s s i o n of e v e r y t e x t . S a i d ' s d e s c r i p t i o n s of this

attitude or cast of mind are forthright and his own displays

of "critical consciousness' are exemplary. He speaks elo-

quently, for example, about the essay-"comparatively short,

investigative, radically sceptical"- the ideal form for criticism,

and he defines Swift with subtlety and precision as a critical

spokesman who counters the humanist Matthew Arnold. He

also shrewdly assesses the shortcomings of Foucault, whom

Said clearly esteems but whose work exhibits a lack of atten-

tion to "change", a defective understanding of "power" and

a blindness about the constructive role of social classes

 and revolutionary movements. In opposition to Faucault's

grandiose vision of totalising systematic power. Said declares

that "in human history there is always something beyond the

reach of dominating systems, no matter h o w deeply they

saturate society, and this is obviously what makes change

possible, limits power in Foucault's sense, and hobbles the

theory of that power". (The World 183)

The World, the Text, and the Critic is forceful and illu-

m i n a t i n g . But we are also u n e a s y w i t h S a i d ' s a n g l e of

approach and concerned about the implications of the critical

stance he outlines. We can agree with Said that critics indeed

have crippled their own enterprise, failed to make their work

'worldly' and done themselves an injustice and their students

a disservice by conceiving of their labour too restrictively.

But once one accepts the truth of this verdict, where then does

one turn? What a kind of specific projects and recommenda-

tions does Said offer? He does allude, for instance, to the

shortcomings of the curriculum, but he does not focus on these

in full detail nor does he elaborate upon what might serve as

a substitute. Said's account is cogent, but at times one feels

the need for more detail, detail of the kind that he brings for-

ward to amplify and deepen his arguments in Orientalism and

«

The Question of Palestine. This limitation of the book is

connected to the critical ideal that Said embraces, to the

'critical consciousness" that is sceptical, ironic, and anti-

systematic. Said does not want to be prescriptive; he does not

want to say that we should do this or that particular thing in

our criticism and teaching. Rather he celebrates an attitude, a

quality of mind, one that is suggestive but that militates against

an account of positive recommendations. "Were I to use one

word consistently along with criticism". Said explains in a

key passage:

it would be "oppositional" If criticism is reduc-

ible neither to a doctrine nor to a political posi-

tion on a particular question, and if it is to be in

the world and self aware simultaneously, then its

identity is its difference from o t h e r cultural

activities and from s y s t e m s of t h o u g h t or of

method. In its suspicion of totalising concepts,

in its d i s c o n t e n t with reified o b j e c t s , in its

 It-3
impatience with guilds, special interests,

imperialised fiefdoms and o r t h o d o x habits of

mind, criticism is most itself and, if the paradox

can be t o l e r a t e d , m o s t u n l i k e i t s e l f at t h e

moment it starts turning into organised dogma.

' I r o n i c ' is not a bad w o r d to use a l o n g with

'oppositional'. For in the main and here I shall

be explicit—criticism must think of itself as life-

-enhancing and constitutively opposed to every

form of t y r a n n y , d o m i n a t i o n , and a b u s e : its

social goals are non-coercive k n o w l e d g e pro-

duced in the interests of human freedom. (The

World 29)

T h e difficulty here is that Said i d e n t i f i e s his o w n

position with difference and in the process .prevents himself

from expressing in an open, detailed fashion just what kinds

of concrete goals and programmes he advocates. He comes

dangerously close to disabling himself here. He defines him-

self in "opposition" to orthodoxy so adamantly that he does

not really allow for a firm statement of an alternative

 orthodoxy. Said does mention "non-coercive knowledge" as

something toward which criticism should progress. But what

is striking about this work is that he does not say much about

this knowledge. It is "oppositional" criticism, not "knowl-

edge" that Said foregrounds and keeps returning to.

The danger of underscoring an "oppositional"

attitude emerges in Said's conclusion, "Religious criticism".

Said objects to the rise of new systems of authority and

orthodoxies in criticism, a trend he judges to be 'religious'

in its deference to consensus and canons of order. Comment-

ing on this situation, he says that "theoretical closure" is

"anathema to critical consciousness which loses its active

sense of an open world in which its faculties must be

exercised"(r/7e World 242), What happens here is that Said

regards himself in "opposition" and thus saddles himself with

a polarity— "secular" versus "religious"— that restricts and

deforms the free movement of "critical consciousness" he

champions. Said runs the risk of committing himself to a

theoretical position that obliges him always to be making

c o u n t e r - s t a t e m e n t s against those a n n o u n c e d by the

 \f>5
prevailing orthodoxy. But that does not equip him, at least

not in the terms the theory p r o v i d e s , t o speak in a more

detailed, positive, and creative manner. Said's terms trap him

into having to advance an argument that he cannot sustain.

Said promotes the exploratory nature of the "critical con-

sciousness", yet his oppositional posture inhibits him. The

• opposition between "secular" and "religious" also masks the

real questions that Said is wrestling with. What is the nature

of critical authority? How does the critic establish and reso-

lutely draw upon his authority, yet retain his freedom? How

does knowledge become "authoritative" without hardening

into an inflexible system, an unquestioned authority? Is it pos-

sible for the critic and teacher to speak "with authority" with-

out being coercive or prescriptive?

Said's The World, the Text, and the Critic does not

offer a clearly stated method or articulated body of theory. It

offers itself, against all these. Criticism, in Said's view, is by

its very nature, anti-systemic. Said argues that criticism must

turn away from what has become the somewhat mystical and

disinfected subject matter of literary theory—textuality. And

 1£4
it must concern itself once more with the worldliness of texts;

that is, their affiliations with power. Even when the texts

appear to deny it, they are nevertheless a part of the social

world, human life, and of course the historical moments in

which they are located and interpreted. Said puts it thus:

The realities of power and authority—as well as

the resistances offered by men, women, and so-

cial movements to institutions, authorities, and

orthodoxies—are the realities that make texts pos-

sible, that deliver them to their readers, that so-

licit the attention of critics. I propose these re-

alities are what should be taken account of by

criticism and the critical c o n s c i o u s n e s s . {The

World 5)

These are the realities, the realities beyond texts but

which are none the less incorporated within them. These are

the realities with which criticism should concern itself. It

should do so, in full recognition of its own worldliness and

circumstantiality, of its limitations and interests in a particu-

lar time and place. The critic, in restoring to the text its worldly
affiliations, restores to his practice a worldly pertinence in

enabling him to speak to and about the worldly realities. As

Tony Bennet suggests apparently there is nothing much to be

objected here. However, difficulties accumulate if one probes

these general formulation more closely, for example:

What type of connection should criticism posit

between the text and its worldliness in order to

produce, for those texts and for itself, a relevant

stake in the worldliness of the present? And how

is criticism to order the relations between the

worldliness of a text's past 'affiliations' and its

affiliations in here and now? To whom should

criticism address itself, and h o w might it best do

so? It is not that Said is silent on these ques-

tions. T h e r e is n o s h o r t a g e o f w o r d s , b u t

precious few proposals which suggest any spe-

cific direction for the conduct of criticism and

precious few concepts except for that of affilia-

Q

tion, by mean of which the relations between the

textual and extra-textual order of reality might

 be theorised. (Bennet 198-99)

Criticism, for Said, is a very loose and elastic term. It is

a habit of thought,a mental orientation. Criticism is indefin-

able except in the most general terms. Criticism is a practice

without allegiances of any sort: to a particular method, theory,

political party or programme of action. "Solidarity before

criticism", Said opines, "means the end of criticism" (The

World 28). Its only commitment is to the text. More than

that, criticism is produced in opposition to theory. This criti-

cism/theory opposition is the organising centre of Said's defi-

nition of criticism. Criticisms is always "skeptical, secular,

and reflectively open to its own failings, a self conscious prac-

tice that is c o n s t i t u t i v e l y o p p o s e d to t h e p r o d u c t i o n of

massive, hermetic systems" ( The World 26 ). Theory, by

contrast, is closed on itself: "Theoretical closure, like social

c o n v e n t i o n or c u l t u r a l d o g m a , is a n a t h e m a to c r i t i c a l

consciousness, which loses its profession when it loses its

active sense of an open world in which its faculties must be

exercised" (242).

Criticism is not merely different from or opposed to

theory. It is elevated above theory. It serves both as theory's

judge and corrective. It is critical consciousness that stands

between theory and the world, indicting theory for its

c l o s u r e s , measuring its inadequacies and initiating a

programme of reform to place it back into contact with the

worldliness it has lost sight of. We distinguish theory from

critical consciousness by saying that the latter is a sort of

spatial sense, a sort of measuring faculty for locating or

situating theory, and this means that theory has to be grasped

in the place and time out of which it emerges. The critical

consciousness is "awareness of the differences between

situations, awareness too of the fact that no system or theory

exhausts the situation out of which it emerges or to which it

is transported. And, above all critical consciousness is aware-

ness of the resistance to theory, reactions to it elicited by those

concrete experiences of interpretations with which it is in

conflict" (241-49).

As Tony Bennet puts it, this is not merely a retreat from

the excesses of theoretical speculation but a determined

attempt to reinstate a resolutely atheoretical conception of

criticism's nature and function. (204)