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đŸȘ” The Threshold

Critics are implicated in the systems they condemn

Properties2
tagsja-picks, definitional_content, singleton, xref, category/definitional-content
aliases@hallaq_restating_2018, loc. 342

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Critics are implicated in the systems they condemn

Evidence

The subversive author, on the other hand, interrogates the foundational assumptions and epistemological mainstays of the discursive formations as well as of the larger system of power that sustains them. Marx was one such author, but after 1917, he rose to the rank of a discursive author. Freud, however, was almost “born,” in one important sense, into a discursive authorship, having gathered discursive momentum some three decades before his death. (It is not the place here to interrogate in any detail Foucault’s lumping together of Marx and Freud, since their discursivity is not of a type, and thus should be further distinguished, schematically and typologically. Since our authors do not belong to any of these categories, it is not essential to engage that issue.) What differentiates the subversive author from his discursive counterpart is the absence in a central domain of a discursive momentum that is integral to a formation. A subversive author is thus synonymous with a latent, potential, or at best embryonic discursive momentum that never rises to the level of a formation, one that is oppositional to the dominating Ă©pistĂ©mĂš. For once that level is attained a subversive author obviously ceases to belong to that category. Yet, while the subversive author shares certain qualitative attributes with the discursive author (chief among them systemic or foundational critique, typified by Marx and Freud, respectively), this type also shares quantitative attributes with the dissenting author. By virtue of dissenting on major—but not foundational or systemic—issues within the system, the dissenting author invariably and inevitably provokes opposition and countercritique. The subversive author likewise tends to generate a measure of critique, at times rather vehement and overwhelming, while at others less so—the latter by virtue of a tendency to marginalize and isolate, whether consciously or not. Yet, the quantitative analogy between the two authors does not only lie here. It is most remarkable in the parallel response in endorsement and following. The dissenting author attracts followers who, by virtue of their awareness of the need to critique the system, end up reinforcing and strengthening the system. The subversive author’s followers stand on the opposite side, adopting the subversive author’s critique with a view to changing the underpinnings of the system, creating another one, altogether different. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 342 (#exemplifies, via linked claim)

Like Keynes, Said believed in the soundness of the overall structure of the system, of its liberalism, secularity, and humanism, and even of its capitalism and bourgeois ethic. Said’s culture, for all the reservations he expressed in The Text, the World, and the Critic and elsewhere, “resembles nothing so much as that of Arnold, Eliot or Leavis—there seems to be no irony intended at all when Said, the great campaigner against racism and ethnocentrism, laments in Leavisite tones the loss of culture’s ‘discrimination and evaluation.’ ” His New York City, the highest manifestation of capitalism and liberalism in the world, was for him iconic; it was not only where Columbia University was found, but also where Bach’s “rational music” and Gould’s sonatas could be heard. Through his powerfully dissenting voice, Said reinforced modern academia and the foundations on which it stands. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 341 (#exemplifies, via linked claim)

Political discourse, to follow on George Orwell’s brilliant formulations, is the chemical formula that dissolves real complexity into myth; it is, itself, constituted as a barrier that suppresses causality, connections, modalities, dialectics, and much else, even intelligence. Samantha Power’s interrogation, like Said’s own political aspersion, is not only superfluous because a genealogy of genocide was not undertaken before critiquing US foreign policy on genocides; it also reinforces the very system that the critic purports to scrutinize. By keeping the critique within the chemical formula, the critic not only places herself within its transformative power, an act of self-subjectification; she also enhances its reproductive capabilities for perpetual myth creation. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 446 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

  • XREF: connects to: Critics’ followers either reinforce a system or seek to replace it; Criticizing a system one is embedded in constitutes epistemic collusion; Critiques conducted within political discourse reinforce the system they claim to scrutinize — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism: A Critique of
, 446 (+9 more)

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