Sayyid's last book: I will never answer questions about how the United States should deal with one kind or another

The original title of this article is "The Public Role of Writers and Intellectuals", selected from Sayyid's last book, "Humanism and Democratic Criticism", published by Sanhui Books/Central Compilation Publishing House in June 2017. Regarding the book, Said put it this way: "After 9/11, a sudden political atmosphere enveloped the United States, and to varying degrees, the rest of the world. The war on terror, the war in Afghanistan, the invasion of Iraq by the Anglo-American coalition: all of these have created a world of high hostility... This has led to an even worsening conflict between the so-called "West" and "Islam"... These articles are precisely the ideas aimed at promoting a coexistence, shared humanistic culture, and whether they succeed or not, I have at least tried, and so much so. ”

Humanism and The Critique of Democracy Book Cover.

In 1981, The Nation magazine convened a writers' conference in New York, and it announced the event, leaving the unanswered question, as I understood its proposal: Who are the writers? Why is he or she eligible to participate? As a result, almost hundreds of people arrived, crowding the large ballroom of a hotel in central Manhattan. The event itself was intended to be a reaction by the intellectual and artist community to the fledgling Reagan era. In my recollection of its process, a heated discussion about the definition of a writer went on for a long time, hoping that some of those present should be singled out and, frankly, prompted to leave. The reason for this is twofold: first, to decide who has and who does not have the right to vote; second, to form a writers' association. As a result, little progress has been made in reducing the membership to facilitate management; the crowd remains numerous and difficult to control, for it is abundant that everyone who has come here as a writer against Reaganism continues to remain as a writer against Reaganism.

I distinctly remember the clever suggestion that we should define a writer in a supposedly Soviet manner, namely that a writer is someone who calls himself or her a writer. I think the problems seem to have subsided, and despite the formation of a National Writers' Union, its function was limited to technical matters, such as the establishment of a more equitable standardized contract between publishers and authors. An American Writers' Congress was also formed to deal with political issues, but it was derailed by some who actually wanted it to deal with one particular political agenda of one kind or another that could not be agreed upon.

Since then, much has changed in the world of writers and intellectuals; if anything, it is that the definition of who or what kind of person is a writer and intellectual has become increasingly confusing and difficult to say. I tried it in the 1993 Reese lecture series Representations of the Intellectual, but it was followed by a major political and economic shift, and in the course of writing this article, I found that I had made a great deal of revisions and additions to my earlier views. At the heart of these changes is an unresolved tension about whether writers and intellectuals can be so-called apolitical, and if so, how and to what extent. Paradoxically, for individual writers and intellectuals, the difficulty of this tension is that the political and public spheres have expanded so much that there is virtually no boundary between the two. Considering that the bipolar world of the "cold war" has been reassembled and dissolved in a number of different ways, all of this offers, first of all, infinite variations on the physical and metaphysical position or position of the writer; secondly, if the concept of the writer or intellectual itself can be said to have some consistency and meaning or existence that can be determined individually, the possibility of giving him or her to play a wide variety of roles is now open. The role of the post-9/11 American writer has certainly broadened the pertinence of the definition of "we" to a great extent.

However, despite a large number of writings and articles saying that intellectuals have ceased to exist, that the "Cold War" has ended, that most American universities have opened their arms to many writers and intellectuals, that the era of specialization has dawned, and that the pervasive commercialization and commodification of the emerging global economy has simply abolished the old-fashioned, somewhat romantic-heroic conception of a lonely writer-intellectual (for the sake of convenience, I'll link the two terms together for the time being, and I'll explain why I'll do it later), but in writers— The thought and practice of intellectuals seem to have great vitality, and they touch the public sphere and are part of it. Lately, they've been objecting – alas! There is also support – the role of the Anglo-American coalition in the war in Iraq is a relevant example of this.

Of the three or four distinct language cultures with which I know a little, the importance of writers and intellectuals is very prominent, in fact unquestionable, in part because many still feel the need to listen to the writer-intellectuals in the present chaos, to see them as guides, as leaders of factions, tendencies or groups that are striving for greater power and influence. Clearly, these two ideas about the role of intellectuals have a Gramsci-esque origin.

Now, in the Arab-Islamic world, the two words used to denote intellectuals are "muthaqqaf", the former derived from "thaqafa" or "culture" (that is, a cultured person) and the latter from "fikr" or "thought" (that is, a thoughtful person). In the context of their use, the prestige of these meanings is enhanced and expanded by the contrast between them and the government, which is now generally regarded as having no credibility and prestige, or rather, no culture and ideas. So, in a moral vacuum created by family-ruled republican governments in countries like Egypt, Iraq, Libya, or Syria, many people either turn to religious beliefs or secular intellectuals (or predominantly male), seeking leadership that is no longer provided by political authority, even if governments are adept at appointing intellectuals as their spokesmen. But the search for true intellectuals continues, and the struggle for it continues.

In the French-speaking community, the term "intellectuel" (intellectual) has always carried with it the lingering legacy of the public sphere, where some of the recently deceased, such as Sartre, Foucault, Bourdieu and Aron, have argued with a very wide audience and promoted their ideas. In the early 1980s, most of the big thinkers (maitres penseurs) disappeared, and some of the satisfaction and comfort given to people disappeared with them, and the new state of excess seemed to give a large number of un influential little people the opportunity to speak on their own for the first time since Zola. Today, there seems to be a sign of Sartre's resurrection, and Pierre Bourdieu or his ideas appear in almost every supplement of Le Monde and Libération until his death, and from this I think that the considerable interest in public intellectuals has captured many people. From a distance, the debate over social and economic policy seems to be very active and not at all one-sided as in the United States.

Raymond Williams's concise formulation of Keywords, which uses a force field with mostly negative connotations to illustrate the word "intellectual", is a very good starting point for understanding the historical semantics of the word, and it is also a very good starting point for getting out of Britain. The excellent follow-up work by Stefan Collini, John Carey, and others has quite deepened and improved the field of practice in which intellectuals and writers have always been. After the mid-20th century, Williams himself continued to point out that the word presented a series of new, slightly expanded associations, many of which concerned ideology, cultural products, and the acceptance and productive capacity of organic ideas and knowledge. This shows that usage in English has expanded to incorporate some of the meanings and usages that are already very common in the Context of France and Europe in general. But, as in France, Williams's generation of intellectuals has gone through that scene (the incredibly brilliant Eric Hobsbawm is a rare exception), and, judging by some of his successors in the New Left Review, may have begun a new phase of Leftist quietism. In particular, given that New Labour has completely denied its own past and participated in the activities of the United States to reorganize the world order, there is a whole new opportunity to appreciate the negative role of dissenting European writers. Neoliberal and Thatcher intellectuals, much the same position they had always been, were superior in the media, with more forums to speak out about, for example, in support of or criticism of the Iraq war.

In the American context, the word "intellectual" is used less than the three discourses I have already mentioned and the arena of discussion. One of the reasons is that professionalism and specialization give intellectuals more standards to their work than they do in Arabic, French or British English. Never before has the cult of experts dominated the world of speech as heavily as it does now, where policy intellectuals can feel him or her across the world. Another reason is that, while the United States is virtually full of hard-working intellectuals, occupying television, radio, print, and cyberspace with their constant stream of ideas and languages, the public sphere is so keen on policy and government issues, and considerations of power and authority, that the notion of any intellectual, who is neither driven by the passions of the official position nor has the ambition to have those in power listen, is fleeting. Both Lee and fame are intense stimulants. Over the years, when I appear on television or in interviews with reporters, I have been asked the question, "What do you think the United States should do about this or that?" I see this as a marker of how the idea of domination is rooted at the heart of intellectual practice outside the university. I can also say, by the way, that one of my important principles is never to answer such questions.

However, it is also true that in the United States there is no shortage of policy intellectuals in the public sphere who are organically connected to this or that party, lobbies, specific interest groups, and foreign powers. Washington's think tanks, all sorts of television interviews, countless radio programs, not to mention thousands of newspapers, periodicals, magazines—all this amply confirms how the rich public discourse relates to interests, authority, and power, the extent to which the latter as a whole is indeed unimaginable in its size and diversity; the only thing that can be known is that this whole concentration exerts pressure to promote a neoliberal post-welfare state, neither to citizens nor to the natural environment. Rather, it is a response to the huge, global enterprises that are not constrained by traditional barriers or sovereign states. America's unparalleled military expansion around the world is a necessary part of this new structure. The various specialized systems and practices of this new economic state are only revealed very slowly and partially, and the government's conception of national security is a pre-emptive war, so that we are beginning to witness first-hand a vast panorama of how these systems and practices (many of which are new, many of which have been renovated by traditional imperial systems) combine to form a geographical situation, the purpose of which is to slowly squeeze and ravage human power. — See one example that I can think of now, Yves Dezelay, Bryant S. G． Bryant G. Garth' Dealing in Virtue: International Commertial Arbitration and the Construction of a Transnational Legal Order. We must not be misled by the rhetoric spread by Thomas Friedman, Daniel Yergin, Joseph Stanislas, and a host of such people who glorify globalization and convince people that the system itself is the best outcome of human history, and in the corresponding way we must also note that bottom-up globalization, such as that of Richard S. Thompson, which has emerged in a less fascinating way. What Richard Falk calls the post-Westphalian world system can be shaped by human potential and innovation. There was now a fairly broad network of non-governmental organizations dealing with minorities and human rights issues, women's and environmental issues, and movements for democracy and cultural change;

However, as Dezler and Garth have shown, given the funding of many of these international NGOs, they risk being targeted by what the two researchers call "L'impérialisme de la vertu", attached to huge multinational funds like Ford, which are at the heart of civic morality, pre-emptively preventing deeper change and criticism of long-standing assumptions.

At this time, in contrast to the discursive world of the academic intellectuals—general isolation from the outside world, full of jargon, and unsafe combativeness—and what is happening in the surrounding public sphere can make one sober and even frightened. Shoo Miyoshi pioneered this comparative study, especially in the marginalization of the humanities. The separation between the academy and the public sphere in the United States, I think, is more serious than anywhere else; though in Perry Anderson's elegy for the Left (in which he proclaimed him editor of the New Left Review), it is clear that, in his view, the Pantheon of the remaining heroes of Britain, the United States, and the European continent is, with one exception, categorically, entirely academic, and almost exclusively male and Eurocentric. I think it's bizarre that he doesn't take into account non-academic intellectuals like John Pilger and Alexander Cockburn, or important academics and politicians like Chomsky, Zinn, late Eqbal Ahmad, Germaine Greer, or all sorts of other figures , such as Mohammed Sid Ahmad, Bell Hooks, Angela Davis, Cornel West, Serge Halimi, Miyoshi Shofu, Ranajit Guha, Partha Chatterjee, Needless to say, the memorable community of Irish intellectuals, which should include Seamus Deane, Luke Gibbons, Declan Kiberd, and many others, will certainly not accept the heavy elegy he chanted because of what he called the "triumph of neoliberalism."

The novelty peculiar to Ralph Nader's participation in the 2000 U.S. presidential race was that a veritable hostile intellectual, using disenchanted, sober rhetoric and tactics, campaigned for the world's most powerful office, in the process providing voters with another message backed by accurate facts and figures for the generally disgruntled government. This is the diametrically opposed to the prevailing model adopted by the candidates of the two main political parties, which are vague, mysterious, bland slogans, and religious fanaticism, supported by the media and, paradoxically, endorsed by the Faculty of Humanities for their inaction. Nader's campaign stance is a sure sign that opposition in the world is far from over and frustrated; it is also proof of the rise of reformism in Iran, the strengthening of democracy against racism across Africa, and so on, not to mention the anti-WTO campaign in Seattle in November 1999, the liberation of southern Lebanon, the unprecedented worldwide protests against the war in Iraq, and so on. It would be a long sequence, and the tone (if it is well explained) would be very different from the kind of consolation of accomodationism that Anderson seems to have recommended. In its purpose, Nader's campaign was also different from his opponents, in that he aimed to arouse the democratic consciousness of all citizens and discover the potential for unopened participation in the formulation of national strategies, rather than merely coveting or simply endorsing what was called politics.

I have just roughly equated the terms intellectual and writer with each other, and now I have to explain why and how they are grouped together, although their origins and histories vary. In the language of everyday use, the writer, in the various languages and cultures with which I am familiar, is the one who creates literary works, that is, the novelists, the poets, the dramatists. I think, in general, in all cultures, the writer has a more unique and perhaps more respectable position than the intellectual; the aura of creativity, an almost sacred original talent (often foreshadowed in the scope and character of his activities) arises naturally from the writer, but does not involve intellectuals at all, and in literature the latter belongs to the critics, that is, to the slightly degraded parasitic class (there is a long history, the critics are attacked, they are regarded as obnoxious, chattering fellows, There is no ability other than nitpicking and excerpting chapters and excerpts, showing off knowledge).) In the last years of the 20th century, however, writers increasingly exhibited intellectual resistance in various actions, such as telling the truth to power, becoming witnesses to persecution and suffering, and speaking out against those in conflict with those in power. The hallmarks of the integration of writers and intellectuals must include the case of Salman Rushdie and its consequences, including numerous writers' councils and congresses dedicated to discussing issues such as intolerance, intercultural dialogue, internal conflicts (as in Bosnia and Algeria), freedom of expression and censorship, truth and mediation (e.g., in southern Africa, Argentina, Ireland, etc.), and so on It also includes the writer's special symbolic role as an intellectual—to confirm the experience of a country or region, thereby giving that experience a public identity, forever inscribed in the endless global chronicle.