Abstract
Is there space beyond the reach of the market? A site not yet annexed by the domain of finance? A sphere, perhaps, in which orders of life are not reducible to relations of exchange, consumption, and valuation? Reflecting on the transformations of the recent past and, likewise, attempting to imagine a future some two, five, or more decades from our present, one wonders—of the human and its creations (its institutions, its knowledges, its arts)—what will survive or perish, extirpated in the name of austerity? What have we lost already? Not tangential to the topic of legacy, these questions arise out of a set of concerns for the fate of the university, historically and materially, in fostering the conditions necessary for humanistic education and the production of knowledge under now-prevalent doctrines positing that “market exchange captures an essential and basic truth about human nature” and that, moreover, the market serves as the arbiter of social relations within all realms and forms of heterogeneous human experience.1 A meditation on humanism in a moment of danger, this essay focuses on Edward Said’s intellectual life and thinking—a life and thinking coincident (but not aligned) with particular global economic experiments and the reshaping of a political consensus that took root during the late 1970s and 1980s.
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Notes
Steven Ward, Neoliberalism and the Restructuring of Knowledge (New York: Routledge, 2012), 1.
See Chris Newfield on the various names for neoliberalism. Christopher Newfield, Unmaking the Public University: The Forty-Year Assault on the Middle Class (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2008), 23.
Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978), 25.
Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2014) offers one of the most recent empirical studies gaining important recognition, although Said among other humanists had long been writing about these issues using different methodologies.
See David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), which addresses at length what he calls the “financialization of everything” (33).
Ward, Neoliberalism and the Restructuring of Knowledge, 3. Ward cites David Felix, “Why International Capital Mobility Should Be Curbed and How it Could Be Done,” in Financialization and the World Economy, ed. G. Epstein (Northampton: Edward Elgar, 2005), 407.
I have in mind Robert Tally’s important observation regarding Said’s concepts of space and geography. See, especially, Robert T. Tally Jr., Spatiality (The New Critical Idiom) (New York: Routledge, 2013), 92.
Said, Representations of the Intellectual (New York: Vintage, 1996), 53.
Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 71.
Edward Said, “On the University,” in Edward Said and Critical Decolonization, ed. Ferial J. Ghazoul (Cairo and New York: The American University in Cairo Press, 2007), 26–36.
See his earlier 1991 interview with Bonnie Marranca, Marc Robinson and Una Chaudhuri, “Criticism, Culture, and Performance,” in Power, Politics, and Culture: Interviews with Edward W. Said, ed. Gauri Viswanathan (New York: Vintage Books, 2001), 94–117, 113. In this same collection, see also Said’s 1993 interview titled “Culture and Imperialism” (183–207, 190) with Paul A. Bové and Joseph A. Buttigieg, originally published in boundary 2.
Said, “Overlapping Territories: The World, The Text, and the Critic,” in Power, Politics, and Culture: Interviews with Edward W. Said, ed. Gauri Viswanathan (New York: Vintage Books, 2001), 53–68, 58.
Said, “Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies, and Community,” Critical Inquiry 9.1 (September 1982), 1–26.
See Rey Chow, “The Politics of Pedagogy of Asian Literatures in American Universities,” differences 2.3 (1990), 30–51.
Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1996), 39.
Giambattista Vico, The New Science, trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1984), 8.
Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975), 373.
Giuseppe Mazzotta, The New Map of the World: The Poetic Philosophy of Giambattista Vico (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 60.
Although here I borrow Said’s use of the terms humanism and antihumanism from Humanism and Democratic Criticism, it is important to note that Said was never simply against “theory,” as Stathis Gourgouris reminds us: “Nor were the so—called post—structuralist theorists simply ‘anti—humanist’ ” (40). While Said spoke against the further commodification or even the “fetishism” of theory, readers of his work will understand how important theory was to his thinking. See Gourgouris, “The Late Style of Edward Said,” in Edward Said and Critical Decolonization, ed. Ferial J. Ghazoul (Cairo and New York: The American University in Cairo Press, 2007), 37–45.
Said, On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain (New York: Pantheon, 2006), 128.
Jodi Melamed, “The Spirit of Neoliberalism: From Racial Liberalism to Neoliberal Multiculturalism,” Social Text 24.4 (Winter 2006), 14.
See Frank Donoghue, The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009).
Chris Lorenz, “If You’re So Smart, Why Are You under Surveillance? Universities, Neoliberalism, and New Public Management,” Critical Inquiry 38.3 (Spring 2012), 599–629, 602. Lorenz also correctly observes, “Remarkably the case has never been properly made for why the professional autonomy of academics should be mistrusted and bureaucratic formalism preferred. It is a crucial presupposition that is built into [new public management] discourse and is therefore not open to debate and criticism” (607). I am also reminded of a lecture given by Paul A. Bové, entitled “Priests and Financiers,” in Pittsburgh, Emory, and Montreal ca. 1998 that bears much on this reading.
Andrew Rubin, “Edward,” in Edward Said and Critical Decolonization, ed. Ghazoul (Cairo and New York: The American University in Cairo Press, 2007), 15–17.
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© 2015 Robert T. Tally Jr.
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Hole, J. (2015). Edward W. Said, the Sphere of Humanism, and the Neoliberal University. In: Tally, R.T. (eds) The Geocritical Legacies of Edward W. Said. Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137487209_4
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