Rock and Plastic

Academic arguments that have a lot of parts can be difficult to use. A lot of wise source use involves taking things apart, enlarging and expanding parts and setting aside what isn't right for the purposes you have. So, how do you do this responsibly, both being faithful to the original terms of whosever work while not committing to what in it might be wrong, misunderstood or just distracting?

Robert Neville calls this the difference between piquant and bland interpretation, which is a great metaphor. Here, though, I want to talk about taking some thing out and and reworking it responsibly, treating an original consistent work of someone else with what I might call a sense of plastic art and doing so responsibly. One particularly famous case of this might illustrate things better.

Edward Said changed everything. And when someone changes everything, he changes it for everyone, forming the discourse, and not everyone takes him in the most productive directions.

That opening passage of Orientalism linked scholarship and culture in the politics of Western empires as a concrete formation, effectively as a monolith. Since reading it, departments and people calling themselves Orientalist have gotten fewer and fewer, but people want a crack at the monolith. Bernard Lewis couldn't do it, but scholars since then have tried to rethink the connections of knowledge and power.

After all, politicians make wars, not scholars. The 19th-century imperialists, like the leaders of our time, tended to be philistines. Might Said have committed the very banal mistake of scholars in assuming they are much more consequential to the broader world than they are?

In The Invention of World Religions, Tomoko Masuzawa quotes a letter from Max Müller. The godfather of religious studies is shocked to learn that during the debates about the future of Ireland, British prime minister William Gladstone was reading Jacoillot's Le Bible dans l'Inde. That bestseller put the origins of Christianity in a covert Aryan Buddhist mission to the ancient Mediterranean. Needless to say, it was universally rejected by scholars but left a mark on the chattering classes who took their own interests in scholarship that had little to do with consensus within university walls.

Just a funny story of course, but it points to a real divide. In our own time, wouldn't we say that the success of postcolonial and critical theory in the curriculum and the policing of overt Islamophobia in scholarly publishing has done nothing to change Western actions in and attitudes toward the Islamic world? So, was Said pushing a claim too hard, without enough of that "nuance" we keep hearing about?

At different times, Said insisted that scholars really did set up the intellectual conditions for global hegemony. I'm not proposing a pious overlooking of parts of his thesis that might need to be considered other ways. But a more plastic, mutable reading can be more flexible if it takes what Said says within his frameworks and working spaces. For me, sometimes Said needs to be read as more plastic than he would have wanted to be.

When he describes that what Orientalists brought into the world was new kinds of knowledge: how non-Western peoples can be known more fully than they could know themselves: that is a trenchant cut into epistemologies of modern power. Like the classical anthropologists, Orientalists were more likely than we remember to be sympathetic to the peoples they studied, but the point isn't really what they said or how they said it. So to conclude the example, the Orientalists set out an inequality of knowledge that it took Said to memorably call out.

What I'm calling plastic, pliable reading doesn't sound acutely insightful; it isn't new, but it's something I try to remind myself about constructions: that constructions aren't the opposites of truths; they are appreciated for what they are made out of and for and how they might be otherwise.

Asking the Right Questions

I have an adviser who has guided me through pushes and pulls in one direction and another. Whatever I started school with is now much more his- it always seems to work like this with graduate students. One of his I'd give to anyone interested is that most of academics is asking the right question. In academic writing this is always important, but I'm also thinking of how particular selection of questions should guide the content I'd want to form here.

In this, somewhere between work at school and personal life, resides politics. And it doesn't make sense to strenuously censor that from a personal blog, especially not a student of modernity and modernization. But, I do want to focus here on a particular kind of questioning at the intersection specialized work in the Western academy, and public life in the world that has been made to fit Western categories and purposes.

Generally speaking, I want to use this space not to think about the merits of well-established positions in public intellectual questions related to personhood, religion or social politics, especially those where traditionalist and progressive alternatives are clearly marked.

Rather, I want to think about what and how assumptions are made regular within the structure of the debate itself, how they assume or do not assume particular kinds of personal flourishing and social solidarity as needing protection or advancement.

The defining example of this genre of questions for me is the class of questions Islamicists call personal status. When colonial powers remade Islamic legal traditions they created a separate space within new law codes to preserve traditional culture: where marriage, divorce and inheritance can be adjudicated according to the sharīʿa, as the colonists interpreted it as long as one was counted as Muslim.

This is useful shorthand for me for a wide variety of what contemporary Americans call "social issues". In the 19th-century West, they were called the "woman-question", the "Jewish question" and so on. All the divides between public and private, between imperial and indigenous, between modernizing and traditional are with us, and they give our worldview its familiar contrasts. See this week's Economist if in doubt about the "real world"; the debate within the academy is more long-winded but nonetheless conforming to familiar contours.

In terms familiar to the former British empire: rather than assessing what kind of counter-position feminism or gay rights poses to the formal Victorian social order, it is more of interest to me here to see the lineaments of that order in the framing of alternatives themselves. The interlocking of concepts of personal integrity and community standing, the publicity and privacy of the family and the centrality and indefiniteness of religion are orders that seem natural but result from particular historical pressures and social formations. To rethink these courses of modernization with the resources of other traditions, in my case I try with Islamic and Chinese traditions, might not produce different answers to the established alternatives of experiment and deference. But it may yet alter the sense of familiarity in the oppositional questions with which we are all so familiar.