Episode Transcript
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Welcome to Audioarchiv!
The channel for historical interviews with writers, philosophers, activists and intellectuals
from all over the world.
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Hello! Anyone who follows the performance of Edward Said in the interview must be surprised.
Because the national-racist ideas did not only come into the world with Donald Trump.
The difference to the present is the resistance against it.
Intellectuals and scientists did not flee abroad like today, but publicly opposed it like Edward Said.
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This is apparently no longer possible in the present.
The USA, like the right-wing radical tech-elites and militant Christian fundamentalists, have become a national-racist elite.
Resistance against the hollow promises of MAGA is intensified with violence.
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In the streets of the cities, people are publicly chased and interned by the army and the FBI.
Checks and balances between executive, legislative and judiciary are lifted.
Scientifically hostile religious fanatics organize public funerals.
Against universities and the mass media, sounds in the sense of the ruling elite.
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In the present, the Palestinian Edward Said, who died in 2003, would probably end up in a prison
camp in the swamps of Florida or even in Guantanamo after an interview like this.
In Germany, he would probably only be banned from entering.
The German elites have always liked to howl with the American wolves.
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Resistance is not in sight against the right-wing, national-racist and male-binding American rollback.
In advance of all obedience, Germany promises armament and restricts democratic fundamental
rights, dismantles social security and radicalizes police and customs in dealing with refugees and migrants.
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The conversation with Edward Said about Orientalism and authoritarian ideas from 1997 is strangely
up-to-date and reminds us that not underthrowing, but resistance against authorities is the
core of rationality and enlightenment.
The lifestyle of some is the misery of others.
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The romantic view of a foreign culture also prevents the West from taking its own problems into
account, as it prevents the so-considered peoples from developing independently. Mr.
Said, what significance does European culture have in the 19th century with the conquest of
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the world by the West?
How does it prevent, as Frantz Fanon says, which I have just quoted, independent development?
The lifestyle of some is the misery of others.
The romantic view of a foreign culture also prevents the West from taking its own problems into
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account, as it prevents the so-considered peoples from developing independently. Mr.
Said, what significance does European culture have in the 19th century with the conquest of
the world by the West?
How does it prevent, as Frantz Fanon says, independent development?
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In the first instance, most official European institutions in the colonial world were interested in profit.
They were interested in natural resources, in spice, in human beings.
For example, the English needed Indians for their army, and they were interested, of course, in promoting trade.
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But also, the other cultures, the distant cultures, were places where some of the problems of
a European society could be exported.
For example, in the Orient, it was thought of as a free sexual paradise, reflecting on the repression
of sexual habits in Europe, so that they could see in the Oriental woman a kind of dream of exoticism and sensuality.
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It was also a place where people of the underclass in Europe could go to these colonial places
and rule, and be more important, because they were white, than the natives.
But for scientists, for explorers, for investigators, the cultures of the Third World were opportunities
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for the exercise of European power through knowledge, so that ethnology, ethnography, was a
way of reconstituting the native into the rules of European anthropology.
It was a way of seeing history, the history of the Indians, the history of the Africans, the
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history of the Muslims, as a phase in the super-development of the West, so that these were all phases left behind.
Hegel said that history traveled from East to West.
So, in looking at Eastern history, it was a way for many of the Orientalists and political scientists
and historiographers to understand the history of lesser people as a phase in the development
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by which, at the end, of course, Europe was triumphant and transcended.
And lastly, the exercise of power was creative.
I mean, it wasn't just a matter of pushing people around.
It became possible to reconstitute the native into something that later became to be called
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the Andijan, for example, in Algeria.
This is the way they thought.
This is the way they acted.
They had a special mentality.
The Arabs only understand force.
Renan, for example, says about the Chinese, the Chinese are a docile people, and they exist to serve us.
The Blacks are underdeveloped, as Carlisle says, and therefore they have to be there to be our
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slaves, and so on and so forth.
It was an exercise of power to reconstitute what was there and use it for purposes of rule and profit.
And I think it's also very important that, and this has a bearing on the present debate about
the clash of cultures, that the idea of cultural identity grows up through imperialism.
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In other words, it's not only the difference between, let's say, a Frenchman and an Indochinese
or a Frenchman and an Algerian, but it's also the difference between French empire and English empire.
The French had the theory, for example, of assimilation, that the French union of colonies.
These were colonies by which the Senegalese, the Indochinese, the Algerians, the Martinicans
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could all be part of a French union.
The English system of indirect rule, whereby India, West Africa, Australia, all of these places
were part of a system of English authority, ruling through a colonial elite, and so on and so forth.
So, the idea of a cultural identity grows up not only in the conflict between the white man
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and the non-white, but also in different kinds of white man.
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How can we describe this Western culture if we see the romantic development in the beginning
of the 19th century, which created the blue flower of the romantic and put on a romantic view
in India, for example, and then find the point where it turns to an imperialistic view of a so-called cultural identity?
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Well, I think for the romantics, it's a very complicated and rich question, so it's difficult
to answer it in all of its phases.
But, I mean, for example, for the Germans, I mean, if you think of Goethe and the West-Ostlicher
Divan, I mean, there, you know, he had never been to the Orient.
He knew the Orient through the translations of poets like Hafez and other Persian, mostly Persian
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poets through the work of people like Rueckert.
And for him and for somebody like Chateaubriand, for example, or Vigny, who actually traveled
to the Orient, the importance of the Orient was that it was a kind of a different world from the European world.
It was a kind of a release.
It was a place where you could indulge your fantasies.
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You could have an exotic sense of the other, of the largeness of the world or the presence of
God, as Goethe says in the Divan.
And for others, for the Schlegels, for example, the Orient was the origin of civilization.
I mean, it wasn't something they ever experienced.
But, for example, the Indo-German, you know, the idea of a primal language was a romantic idea
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from which all subsequent languages came.
Now, and the same was true for the English.
There was a sense in which if you look at the poetry, for example, of Byron or Shelley or Blake,
they were very influenced by their readings in not only the Bible, but in the domains discovered
by travelers, by scientists, by Champollion, for example, by the Napoleonic expedition to discover
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these ancient cultures that were older than the Bible.
And it gave them a new sense of world history, that world history was not bounded by the Bible,
but by something much vaster and much more deep and dark and so on.
But in all of these instances, the romantic view was based on an ideal.
Where it began to change is when the ideal, as Fanon says, begins to encounter the reality.
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And the reality is the period at the present, the actual Egyptians, the actual Indians, the actual Algerians.
I mean, Delacroix paints these wonderful pictures, you know, the death of Sardinapolis before
he went to the East and this great opulent, colorful place.
But a few years later, when Tocqueville, who was in the assembly in the 1830s and 40s, understands
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that Algeria is not just a place of color and Delacroix's imagination, but also a place where
there's a war going on.
There's a fierce resistance by the Algerians under Abdelkader fighting the French.
That Tocqueville begins to understand, as he says, that there's a kind of eternal hate between
the French and the Algerians.
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Because one is striving to conquer, the other is striving to resist.
And the problem of the relationship between the contemporary and the classic, between the present
and the ideal, is always in the end resolved in favor of the ideal, the present.
Because by the middle of the century, by the middle of the 19th century, the issue becomes one
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of rule, authority, the establishment of institutions.
For example, in India, we're talking here about a very small number of English who are ruling
a country of 300 million people.
So they have to devise ways, not only military ways, but also intellectual ways to pacify them, to keep them down.
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And so, for example, the English system of education for Indians is a way of instructing Indians
in the superiority of the English.
So that very quickly, literature, for example, the use of Milton, a great poet, right?
Where Milton becomes used in the schools, not as a way of illustrating only the triumph of a
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great poet and of the English language, but a way of impressing young Indians with the power
and authority of this remarkable, sonorous language, which is the language of the English, where
God speaks and the devil speaks.
And these teachers represent this language to young Indians who begin to understand that their
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respect for the English is ontological. It's necessary.
And it also teaches them to have very mixed feelings, very sort of negative feelings about their own culture.
You see, I mean, if the gods and the first men in paradise law speak in such a majestic way,
what are we to do about our gods with ten arms and three heads?
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And, you know, it's a much less impressive system.
And so there's a sense of insecurity and a sense that the word, the logos, is in Europe, not for us.
So this transformation, I think, is absolutely a crucial one from the romantic to the actual.
But as the wheels of profit drive further expansion, further means of control, you know, to
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make sure, for example, in India, that the cotton exported to England is reimported by the British
from the English cotton mills to keep the English economy going.
So there becomes a new kind of imperative, which is the imperative of profit and rule, both
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of which come together in the figure of the European authority.
I would like to take one more small step back, and that is to the time of the Enlightenment,
where you have a reception of the Orient, which is completely different again and which is fundamentally
different from the reception through Romanticism.
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And which is important to me because in the middle of the 19th century, many intellectuals in
the Third World wanted to take this enlightenment into their own hands.
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I want to ask this question in one aspect, because I think that in the middle of the 19th century,
the intellectuals from this Orient world, from these different cultures, take this reception
of enlightenment for themselves, or they try to take it, but they were pushed away by the Europeans. Absolutely.
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I mean, if you look at a series of examples in French and, say, English literature in the 19th
century, if you look, for example, at Samuel Johnson's novel, Rasselas, if you look at Montesquieu's
Lettre aux Personnes, you'll see there, and Goldsmith, The Traveller, and Lessing, lots of German,
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Germans, of course, Kant, all.
There's a certain sense in which the East is a kind of perspective on the West, which allows
the Westerner to leave his own society and look at it through a different, higher moral perspective.
In other words, a perspective that is not torn by greed, ambition.
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There's a certain image, which is that of the calm sage, you know, somebody who can look at
the world without undue emotion.
You see it in Samuel Johnson.
And I think this idea of a kind of elevated exchange between Orient or different parts of the
world and Europe is exactly the one, as you said, that in newly modernizing societies, for example,
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Egypt in the early 19th century, the dynasty of Muhammad Ali, right?
What was the first thing he wanted to do?
He wanted to send young men from Egypt to Europe to learn.
I mean, it was exactly the Enlightenment model that rationality, that science, that progress
can come to us if we learn from the Europeans in the way that they claim to have learned from us.
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Whereas they found in us the wisdom of philosophy, of theology, we will take from them the wisdom
of technology, of modernity, of rationalism, of science.
And so we will send our young men. It happened in India. It happened in Egypt.
It happened in the Ottoman world.
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That you send them to Paris or London or Berlin to study in order to get the fruits of modern learning.
Inevitably, what happened, I think, is that when they came back, there are great waves.
Certainly, I know in the Arab context, there are great waves of translation where works get translated.
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You know, these are important works.
We read them in Europe.
We should bring them back.
And Muhammad Ali Institute, a very powerful, a very advanced system of translation.
Not, I just want to interfere, not only book, they brought the theater. Yes, exactly.
I mean, yeah, all kinds of cultural forms.
I mean, you know, learning how to build gardens in the French Manor, for instance, you know,
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architecture very much influenced by European models.
And there was an influence of, you know, of Oriental models on European architecture.
So it was an interesting exchange.
But at the same time, as the economic interests grew in Europe, there was a certain sense in
which the idea of independent development in these colonized countries was always opposed.
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Because they would say, the Europeans would say, if they become too independent, then we will
lose our sources of revenue.
We will lose our base in these countries.
And so what they began, I mean, this is where you find already in somebody like Gobineau, the
idea of racism, the idea of racial superiority, that these people can advance.
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But on the scale of development, they could only advance up to a certain point.
And that point can never go beyond us.
In other words, constitutionally, constitutively, a native can never be more intelligent, more developed than a European.
And that then leads to the idea that natives always have to be in a subordinate position.
I mean, they have to learn from us.
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We can't learn from them.
And this becomes institutionalized in imperialism.
I would like to clarify two or three terms that we talk about all the time.
This is the development of the concept of culture as an identity in the 19th century, where the writers also contributed.
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The European writers, but also the Arabic writers, for example, in the early 19th century.
This is the concept of the nation.
And this is the concept of civilization, a messianic concept that should conquer the world from the French Revolution,
should improve the world, but actually later became a very instrumental concept of the rule
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of the West over the rest of the world.
Maybe you can elaborate on these terms a little bit more.
which came up from the French Revolution and was used later as an instrument from the European against the others.
It's the word culture, the term culture, and it's the word modernity, which came up in the 20th
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century in art first and then in context with the clash of civilization.
Totally different term political now.
Maybe we can clear it up from the history.
You know, I have trouble with some of these definitions because obviously Huntington wants to
make a distinction between civilization and culture.
For him, civilization is that which is stable, that which never changes.
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It's the basic books, the basic ideas, let's say, of Islamic civilization, of Western civilization, etc.
A culture is more individual.
It's something that is more dynamic, according to him. It changes.
It's possible to have a modernist culture.
It's possible to have an enlightenment culture.
So in other words, cultures, while having an identity related to the civilization from which
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they come, are dynamic and change, whereas civilizations, in effect, don't. I think that's nonsense.
In other words, I think those kinds of distinctions are so mechanical and so resistant to clarity
that I prefer to use the word rather than the clash of civilizations.
I call it a much more interesting thing, I think, the clash of definitions, because I think
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what's really going on in the world is not according to what Huntington says, who looks at everything
in a very superficial way, and really from the point of view of somebody who was a great theorist
of the Cold War, who wants to readapt the theory of conflict for use in a non-Cold War world.
But what I think is going on is that there is a clash of definitions within cultures and societies.
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That is to say, if you look now at what is the most in the Islamic world, what is the most acute
discussion, it's not about Islam versus the West or Islam versus India or Islam versus China
or Islam versus Japan, but it is, what is Islam?
What does it mean to be a Muslim in today's world?
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And all across the Islamic world, whether you're talking about Morocco or Egypt or Saudi Arabia
or Iran or Malaysia or Indonesia and Pakistan, the discussion is about what is Islam?
How can one be a Muslim?
Does it mean a certain regulation, for example, of personal conduct?
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Does it mean an egalitarian attitude?
Does it mean more women's rights or less women's rights?
Does it mean wearing a chador?
Does it mean thinking in a particular way?
Does it mean having a particular view of economic development?
All of these things are questions of identity that are being debated inside the society.
So I think Huntington gives a very misleading idea that every Muslim knows what Islam is and
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therefore is attacking the West and vice versa.
And one of the things he misses, I think, is the same thing in the West.
In other words, one of the crises of modernity in the West, beginning, say, with Nietzsche,
is the question of who are we and what are we?
I mean, is it possible to talk about an identity or are there many identities or identities,
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facts of power or facts of will?
And moreover, what Huntington has no awareness of, again, in the West, I think his misunderstandings
of his own society is the greatest.
I mean, he doesn't know anything about Islam, but you can say, well, that's not his job.
He doesn't know anything about Japan.
He doesn't know anything about Africa.
He doesn't know anything about the Slavic world.
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But you can say, well, OK, it's not necessary to know.
But then he's always talking about the West, the Western way of thinking.
He's wrong about that because one of the most powerful, again, going back to Nietzsche, one
of the most powerful aspects of Western, if there is such a thing, identity is the revolt against authority.
I mean, we're saying, well, OK, I mean, you know, we used to believe in a certain unitary view of the world.
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But after Darwin, after Marx, after Freud, after Nietzsche, we can no longer think that way.
And second, we know now through the work of cultural scientists, you know, Kulturwissenschaft,
that cultures are much more complex and not simply one thing.
First of all, they're all mixed.
I mean, if you look at the work of the English historians Ranger and Hobsbawm, the notion of tradition can be invented.
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There's no such thing as a inert tradition, which you just pick up and say, well, I'm following the tradition.
The question is, what is the tradition?
People can make up traditions as they go along.
The way the British did in India, for example, or in Europe, the way they invented the rituals
of the football game, which didn't exist before.
So this is our tradition.
It's only 30 years old, but we call it a tradition.
And on the other hand, we have the work of somebody like Bernal, my own work, who says that
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the image of a culture or of a civilization is also manufactured to suit purposes of the time.
That if you want to create an orient that is debased and sensual and non-moderate, you can do it.
It has nothing to do with a real orient, but it's a matter of inventing images of the other
that are useful to you.
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I mean, that's what we all do.
And when Bernal talks about the invention of ancient Greece as the kind of model of Aryan civilization,
it goes against the evidence, which is that Greece was an amalgam of Jewish, African, Phoenician,
Aramaic, and, of course, local elements that constituted what we now call classical Greece,
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but which we have transformed into a model of the origins of the West.
In other words, we've created it in order to derive ourselves from it.
Now, all of this is going on.
And I think, therefore, to say that the main fact is the quarrel of cultures against each other
is to ignore what is taking place inside these cultures, which I wouldn't say are struggles
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of civilizations, but they're struggles of cultural definition.
Can one talk in this context from a tradition of modernity?
The tradition is to invent... Yes, absolutely. Of course.
Well, I mean, it's not only modernity.
There's modernity, there's modernism, and now there's postmodernism.
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I mean, so that modernity within itself has many periods and many phases which are not the same.
So, I know, for example, in the Arab world, one of the big debates is the debate on Hadassah, which means modernity.
But you can't discuss modernity unless you also discuss al-Turath, which is the tradition.
So, the two have to be defined in terms of each other.
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And there's no consensus on that.
I mean, of course, the religious authority will tell you that al-Turath is the Qur'an and the
Hadith and the Sunnah, you know, orthodoxy.
Yes, but for every definition of orthodoxy, there are 55 definitions of a counter-orthodoxy
or a heterodoxy or a challenged orthodoxy.
So, modernity is not a thing, you called it an invention, but I would say it's a continual debate,
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which is constantly defining and redefining itself to suit the purposes of the debate.
I mean, if it's a question, for example, now, again, to go back to the Arab world, of Hadassah,
it's not only Hadassah versus al-Turath, which is traditional, but it's Hadassah versus al-Takhalluf,
which is being backward with regard to Israel, with regard to the West.
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And there's also a movement of trying to understand how we can release ourselves, and this is
a very important artistic movement of the new al-Hadith, to see how you can write in new forms,
new languages that are not dominated by al-Turath or al-Sunnah, you know, orthodoxy.
So, this is a continual debate and a continual transformation.
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I want to ask you, going back to the end of the 19th century, maybe 1870s or 1880s, how literature,
culture is working to create a Western identity and at the same time create an identity of the others.
How does this fit together with the imperialistic way?
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It's a very tough question.
It's a very tough question.
But look, I mean, it varies from country to country.
I mean, I think, for example, that in France and Britain, there is a much stronger sense of
cultural identity that is, in effect, imperial and contrasted with others than there is, let's
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say, in Italian or German.
I mean, it's not quite the same thing.
Although, for example, in Death in Venice, I mean, in the Man novella, there it's quite clear,
for example, that what's happening to Aschenbach is that he is succumbing, in the end, to an Asiatic plague.
I mean, the thing is that Venice is the furthest east of the great European cities, and therefore
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it's on the border of Europe, and there's the great danger of the invasion of this disease,
for which there's a long history.
I mean, because it goes back, of course, to Euripides and the Bacchae, where Dionysus is also
an eastern god who comes in and threatens the western identity and the stability of the west.
And in Man, it's ambiguous.
I mean, it's something that you are afraid of, that's dangerous, that can kill you.
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But on the other hand, it's also very desirable.
Now, in the case of, say, Kipling, who is older than Man, there it's more complex because Kipling,
for example, sees India as essentially different than the English.
But in his novel Kim, for example, his main character is not an English boy, but an Irish boy.
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In other words, somebody who, within the English system, is slightly outside, slightly on the
margins, an Irish, who is therefore able to exist in India, which is a different culture, and
go around it in disguise, looking like the Indians, because he could speak the language that he was born there.
But what is at the bottom, of course, of Kipling's vision is not so much that the east is a
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threat, but that it is unchanging.
I mean, India is a one — I mean, he loves it because he grew up there, and the novel is full of wonderful descriptions.
And all of his novels, his short stories — I mean, he didn't write many novels, but his short
stories of India are full of extremely affectionate descriptions, marvelous descriptions of
Indian scenery, of Indian characters, of Indian speech, and so on and so forth.
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But for him, the difference is that whereas the English are in a position of authority and occasionally
come close to the Indians, the Indians themselves never really change.
There's a kind of essential quality to them, you see, that doesn't allow what we would call
historical development, which means that Kipling was blind to the development of Indian nationalism,
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which was taking place as he was writing. He never saw it.
I mean, the Congress Party was organized already in 1880.
Kim has a novel of 1895.
He has no idea that there's a nationalism going on.
Conrad is even more complicated.
I mean, of course, he's a Polish-English writer.
But for him, the other is always a real presence and a threat, but also extremely attractive,
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something that you always — you know, like in Heart of Darkness, you're always trying to go
to the heart of the darkness.
And although he was one of the first great European writers to understand the abuses of imperialism,
there is always the sense in which there can be no replacement for a Western view of the world.
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In other words, he can't allow himself to see an Africa that is independent of the white man,
that even with all the abuses of the white man, Kurds in Heart of Darkness, or in South America,
you know, Gould, the English Gould, and in Costa Guana and elsewhere in all of his stories,
you notice that although the abuses of imperialism are great and he's very sharp in denouncing
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them, at the same time, he says this is inevitable.
And as African writers like Chinua Achebe have said, since he does this in the end by dehumanizing
the native, the native is considered to be somehow grimacing kind of creature, not quite fully
human in the sense in which we understand it.
So what you have, I think, is a gradual theme emerging of the outsider, of the outsider in two kinds.
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There's the outsider, for example, in Joyce, who is a Jew, but also an Irish who is outside
Europe. and alongside him is Stephen Dedalus, right?
There's a view of the outsider, which is terribly important.
And then the outsider as threat, the outsider as attractive alternative on the one hand, and
the outsider as somebody who could destroy the whole system.
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And that could be a native or it could be a European who's gone too far, like Kurds in Heart of Darkness.
I apologize for jumping back and forth a bit.
Excuse that we go from one point to the other. but there's one point which is remarkable then
in the art, in the European art, in the modern art, in the beginning of the 19th century. that
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is that they take all this natural art to bring it to Europe, not only to show more, to break
maybe a point of view from European, in European development.
How does this fit together in a time of imperialism? Let's say in German.
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It's also a difficult question to answer in general, because, I mean, there are two things at work here.
One of them obviously is that there is within, say, the development of bourgeois society, the
growth of what you might call romantic anti-bourgeois or anti-capitalism in European art. where
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an artist like Picasso, for example, wants to destroy the laws of perspective. and what he attaches
himself to make this partly is, of course, African art, where certain rules of composition are
in Europe, which are seen to be authoritative and powerful and have a kind of hegemony over
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the artist. whether through the academy or through religion or through the market, are challenged
by these new forms, which I think is principally an aesthetic phenomenon, right?
I mean, these are individuals.
You see it in Rimbaud, for example, the latter part of his life. he destroys his career as a
poet in order to become a traveler in Africa and a slave trader and so on, where he becomes
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another, you know, je suis un autre, I am another.
And this is very powerfully within the culture itself.
But the big question, the critical question, I mean, the question that is extremely important
is what is the connection between these aesthetic? what is interesting in these kinds of developments
is that in most instances, whether you look at somebody like Conrad or Joyce or Mann or Proust,
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let us say the modernist writer or Picasso painter or Stravinsky and Schoenberg as composers,
their aesthetic experiments derived to a very great degree from their own sense of being exiles
in the society, exiles and emigres.
That is to say, they are outsiders in the society in which they live.
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I mean, Picasso is Spanish, Conrad is Polish, Joyce is Irish and a colonial Ireland and so on and so forth. So there's that beginning.
And I think that's a political fact where the sense in which society is thought of as itself
foreign. but to make that step and then to go from there, I mean, to make that observation and
(36:52):
then to go from there to the context of imperialism, I think is necessary, but dangerous because,
I mean, it then suggests that all modernism is part of imperialism.
I mean, the problem is that there hasn't been really a development, a scientific development
or a cultural development or theoretical development, which allows us to make that.
(37:14):
So all one can do, and I try to do it in my book on culture and imperialism, is to write some suggestions for future study.
How do you relate the sense of empire in modernism without doing damage to the aesthetic work,
but without also neglecting the larger picture?
And I think this work is just beginning and it can only be done from the perspective of a post-imperial
(37:39):
critic or a post-colonial critic.
In other words, you have to be able to look back at it because in many instances, there's some exceptions, for example, E.M.
Forrester in a passage to India.
I mean, for him or Camus in his works, which are all set in Algeria, there is a sense of the colonial struggle.
There is a sense of the colonial struggle, but these artists are so skillful that in the case,
(38:00):
for example, of Forrester, he destroys the colonial content or abates it by ironizing it.
So the Indians in passage to India are all quite funny.
I mean, Indian nationalism is reduced to something that is a joke or not yet. Not yet.
In other words, the time hasn't come for the English and the Indians to become friends, as ease and fielding.
But when they are together, the Indian nationalists act like, you know, children who are not very well developed.
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And in the case of Camus, the outsider is always something of a threat and therefore either
killed, like in L'Etranger, where Meursault kills an Arab without any name. but Algeria is terribly
important as a background or is thought of only as kind of a background.
There's no, at the same time that, for example, we now know that Camus was very involved in
(38:46):
the struggle against the FLN.
I mean, he was a man who really fought Algerian nationalism, even though in Europe today, he's
still considered a man of conscience.
Now, last point to be made.
In certain societies, contemporary societies, for example, France, there is no important post-colonial
criticism so that the great figures of the past 150 years, beginning with Chateaubriand and
(39:12):
Vigny and through Hugo and coming down through the great novelists like Flaubert and Proust
and so on and so forth, Malraux especially, there is no critical viewpoint on this because the
French sense of empire is still there.
I mean, there hasn't been a struggle and because the French empire ended with some very powerful
defeat, I'm thinking of Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and Algeria in 1962, which are still refused today.
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And there's a certain sense still within French society, which goes back to the time of Napoleon,
of a French mission, mission civilisatrice, which is now transformed into a francophonie and
a kind of alternative to Anglo-Saxon or American empire. So it's still there.
And it's very difficult to say anything about the writers that I've mentioned in this post-colonial context.
(39:58):
Whereas in England and America, it's more possible.
Why do you think that it was only in the last 20 years that one has dealt with, as Benjamin
says, reading the story again against the line to get a new perspective on what is actually
incomprehensible from today's point of view?
(40:29):
Why do you think it is now, since maybe your book, Orientalism, was one really big point of
start? why do you think now this is like Benjamin said, again, read history against this logical, official way of interpretation?
Why does this begin now, as you mentioned, like we are in a second modernity?
(40:53):
Well, I think because the basis, I think the reason is principally because the notion of identity
itself has been challenged and undermined so much that it used to be a simple thought that when
you say, I am French, I am German, I am Muslim, I am black, all of these things, one understood what that meant.
(41:22):
But now I think because of the breakup of the classical empires, because of the enormous number
of migrations that I mean, this is the century of migration in which whole societies, I mean,
Germany today is not like Germany 25 years ago.
I mean, Germany today is now there's not only the problem of unification, there's also the problem
(41:44):
of Muslim minorities in Germany who have changed the concept of what it means to be a German, same in France.
I mean, the second largest religion in France is Islam. It's not Judaism. It's not Protestantism. It's something from outside.
The same is true of Sweden.
The same is true of Italy and certainly in the United States, where the notion of an American
identity is now so much under pressure because within that identity, not only a whole number
(42:12):
of conflicting identities, Indian, Chinese, I mean, Native American, Indian, Chinese, Latino,
African-American, et cetera, but also a new consciousness that the old concept of identity of
a singular identity is somehow not only untrue, but also a form of tyranny has to be overthrown.
(42:34):
I mean, it has to be changed.
So I think this new consciousness of a multicultural, multi-ethnic reality produces two reactions,
both of which are not good, I don't think.
One is to say, I mean, we have it here in the university all the time.
If you're a member of a, what is considered to be a minority Asian American, you want studies that are Asian American.
(43:00):
So we now, because the students put a lot of pressure and they said, we want a African-American
literature, which is different from English literature.
In other words, it's a separate field and we want ethnic studies or we want women's studies
and we want all of these separate.
In other words, the notion of separatism and de-integration.
And the reaction, which is the second form, which is to say on the part of the conservatives
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who say, no, there is one civilization and this is a Western country and what we must teach
here are Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Rabelais, Goethe and Balzac.
I mean, that's the canon.
And there's very little dialogue between them because each then tends to go to one extreme after the other.
And I think it's the role of people like myself who in fact belong to many cultures and see
(43:51):
no need to make a choice.
See, I mean, I think that's the issue.
So I don't feel the need, neither as an Arab or an Oriental or as a to say I'm this and not that.
In other words, instead of saying either or, I prefer the word and. and I think the new tendency
in the human sciences and cultural studies is to produce paradigms of assembly, paradigms of
(44:19):
association and to try to understand culture as a slow process of exchange between one culture and another.
And you can see it in some of the great figures in precisely those cultures.
I'm talking about Islamic culture in precisely those cultures, which are considered to be the most fanatical about identity.
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This can only emerge with a new reading.
And there's a Syrian scholar who lives in France called George Tarabishi, for example, who has
reread the Turath, the classical Arabic tradition.
I'm thinking of two writers in particular, Jahez and Ibn Khaldun, for both of whom the question
(45:04):
of being an Arab was always contrasted with being a Ajam, which is the Persian. and his reading
is to emphasize in the writings, especially of Ibn Khaldun, the necessity that Ibn Khaldun places
upon the need for an Arab to become a Persian, you understand?
In other words, to go out of one identity and go into another.
(45:24):
But this requires not only a new reading, but a new emphasis in reading.
In other words, this is in fact a desirable and not a fearful thing.
And some of the great pioneers, Euripides does it.
What does it mean for Pentheus in the Bacchae to become Dionysus, to think he is Dionysus? there's
tragedy and there's destruction, but there's also a new kind of insight.
(45:46):
I think this type of cultural, this type of cultural philosophy is slowly becoming more the
leading kind and making figures like Huntington and the conservatives who say that, you know,
there's the only West and there's East and they have to be separate and we teach the hours and they teach theirs.
In other words, nationalism in the in bad sense of the word, or the segregated fragmented notion
(46:11):
is giving way to the possibility of a different synthesis.
The danger seems to be less in the conflict between these two poles than in a capitalist world
culture. the danger is not that this capitalism, even after the collapse of the left theories,
which seem very simplistic from today's point of view, but have resisted, whether this does
(46:36):
not prevent this kind of positive development of a multicultural, multi-ethical and free society.
The danger is more or less from capitalism, capitalism road all over Western capitalism.
Well, see, I think there are two questions there.
One is what you're describing, which I would call globalization, where there's a kind of transnational
(46:59):
force of capitalism, which is to move everywhere and to penetrate societies in such a way so
that McDonald's is a perfect example that you give. but that is, I think, limited in terms of culture.
That's very limited essentially to a kind of consumerism.
I mean, where there's a sense in which jeans and Coke and McDonald's and television, I mean,
(47:20):
it's a mass consumer society, which is getting exported everywhere and it's to be found everywhere.
But I think it has limits also.
I mean, I don't think it enters into every field of the local cultures.
I mean, look at the interests, for example, just comes to mind in India and Iran and Pakistan,
the interest in Qawwali singing, which is highly specific Sufi kind of special music.
(47:44):
It's never been as popular as it is now.
And the same is true in the Arab world.
I mean, certain types of music.
I mean, the return of Oum Kassoum of very traditional, extremely culture specific forms still exist.
So I think I'm not doing the question justice enough because there's so many details to be gone into.
I certainly agree with you on the spread of a capitalist model, but I think before there is
(48:10):
a count economic counter example presented, there is demonstrated through all of these local
cultural forms, an unwillingness to accept the model presented by late capitalism as the only one.
I mean, I think there's a certain sense in which we don't have because of the decline of the
left, because of the end of a certain kind of Marxist orthodoxy.
(48:31):
We don't now have a ready-made alternative model to transnational capitalism, but through cultural
forms of the kind I've mentioned, which are, I would say are resistant forms or at least questioning
forms, the return in the Arab world, for example, to Islam, which means many, many, many, many different things. It's not one thing. It's not all fundamentalism.
(48:53):
I mean, there's certain is part of a also political discussion, which is saying is capitalism the only alternative? Obviously it's not.
We can't accept the model provided by the IMF and the World Bank and the United States because
we see the problems, the problems of poverty, the problems of ignorance, the problem of powerlessness.
(49:14):
When you're talking about powerlessness, that's the main issue.
The people who are defenseless, who have no place to go.
I think now what we're going through is a tremendously investigative and restless stage in which
a search for a new model of coexistence, which is not based on the capitalism on a world scale,
as Semin Amin calls it, or rather accumulation on a world scale, but something different.
(49:40):
Now, we don't know what that is, but people are asking the question.
I think that's what's most significant.
And part of it is involved in what I called earlier, the search for a new sense of cultural identity. What does it mean?
I mean, if you're going to talk about yourself as having a cultural identity, you can't simply
return to the old idea and say, well, I am a Muslim. I'm a Pakistani, etc. Those don't work.
(50:02):
Nationalism has been exhausted precisely by capitalism, where it doesn't mean anything anymore.
And elites are beginning to look like the same.
They all carry Samsonite bags.
They use the same fountain pens.
You know, Mont Blanc is a symbol now of a kind of, you know, worldwide capitalist elite.
And so there's a search for something else.
And I think that's where we are now.
I mean, I think that's interesting.
And I think it's hopeful.
(50:47):
Now,
political movements in Africa, who are after rays of the wall, went on the streets in China
(51:08):
and Africa to organize themselves and fight for more freedom, demonstrate for more freedom.
They are pushed back like the national movements in the 1880s, 1890s century in the same countries.
I'm not so positive as you think that there is a way to construct through culture, through cultural identity, a political movement.
(51:31):
No, I wouldn't say it's through cultural identity principally. Of course not.
But I think it is through cultural identity, or at least the debate over cultural identity,
which is a different thing.
Alternative economic forms, you see, I think is very important. And alternative political forms.
I mean, if you look across the third world, you mentioned Kenya, you take Zaire, you take South
(51:52):
Africa, you take Algeria and Morocco.
They are all different stages of the bankruptcy of classical nationalism in one way or another. Right.
I mean, it didn't work.
And I think the Fanon question that you raised, I mean, what Fanon was, in my opinion, was beginning
to sketch, but he never did it, was the difference between independence, where you have a Kenyan
(52:15):
state and you have a Zairian state and you have all of these that turn out to be really in the
end part of the world system versus the question of liberation.
What does it mean in this sense to be liberated?
Does it mean that you accept the old forms recycled by world capitalism, as we've been discussing it?
Or, as I say at the end of my book on culture and imperialism, do you look for different forms,
(52:38):
erratic forms, wandering, nomadic forms, people who want to inhabit new spaces, where the questions
of cultural identity, political identity, economic identity are more complex and where, this
is a very important point, and where I think the intellectual plays a particularly sensitive
role. not the vast general intellectual, you know, like Voltaire or Sartre, but as Foucault
(53:02):
says, the idea of a specialized intellectual who addresses conjunctures or problems, social
justice and aesthetic form, the need for reform versus the need to overthrow, issues of that
sort, all of which are underpinned by something to do with justice and oppression.
I mean, and the notion of equitability and liberation in the sense in which Fanon meant it.
(53:26):
You say you're not optimistic about it.
I don't know whether the word optimist or the word pessimist is really the right one here.
I'm more interested in the word of possibility. Is it a possibility?
And I think it is a possibility.
I mean, and I think looking at the history of the last 200 years, I think there are enough resources
of hope within that history to draw on, not because they all succeeded. in many instances, they
(53:51):
failed, but because you could take from here and you could take from here and you can improvise.
I mean, what I'm talking about is a kind of improvisatory sense in which possibility and hope
lead you without illusions and without a kind of aggressiveness, whether defensive or offensive
that we associate with classical imperialism, into a new type of partnership.
(54:15):
It exists, for example, in the environmental movement.
It exists in the women's movement.
It exists in the awareness of certain new kinds of biological and bio-ecological issues having to do with disease.
I mean, look, AIDS, I mean, the sort of world consciousness of AIDS in science, where there
are exchanges of science possible, of course, at a very high level through math, mathematics
(54:40):
and others, which suggests that we're moving away from classical definitions of solitary or
aggressive identity into new areas of complexity, which more of us are beginning to be accustomed
to and to accept rather than simple solutions and saying, well, we all have to become this or
we all have to become that.
Isn't that a middle-class welfare thinking that doesn't correspond at all to what has been going
(55:05):
on in Western societies, for example, in the last few years, if you look at it critically?
Increased racism, the closure of countries to immigrants.
So how does that fit together with a thinking that continues to move intellectually?
(55:46):
Immigration is not anymore. It's a crime. They send people back. They build walls everywhere.
How can you on the one side see these movements as optimistical and on the other side, you see
the people who are discriminated, they are growing and it's even more aggressive society than
(56:06):
it was 15 years ago.
No, no, I completely agree with you.
And I'm not saying, and I mean, obviously somebody like Huntington is a symptom of this.
I mean, because you can read Huntington as a call to stop immigration.
We don't want any more of these people, not only to stop immigration.
It's more reactionary even than that, his book, because he says we have to be very careful not
(56:26):
only to protect our borders against all of these new people, but also to make sure that we enter
these other societies and help people who will be on our side and hurt the ones who won't be.
And he said, be very careful of alliances between Confucianism and Islam.
We have to stop that.
I mean, if China and Islam get together, completely crazy, paranoid, you have to enter into
(56:48):
all of these other places in order to promote our interests.
Yes, I mean, the problems of immigration, the growth of racism, the triumph of a kind of super
capitalism and a kind of fantastic ideology, which you find in cinema where, whether you consider
a film like Air Force One, I don't know whether you saw that with Harrison Ford, where the president
(57:11):
fights off these Russian nationalists, right, or films that are about Chinese and Arab terrorists
and so on and so forth.
All of that is there, of course.
But I think there are signs of a restlessness against what is obviously a problem of otherness,
which is too great to control by simple means.
I mean, it's an awareness that the limits of A, the national security states, of B, the classical
(57:38):
nationalist identity, of C, the simplified capitalist model have been reached, the limits, we
are at the limits already.
So you have to keep inventing these magical solutions, these refusals that to me provide no hope at all.
I mean, what is the hope in something like Huntington?
Nothing, to go back and read Plato and fight against China.
(57:59):
I mean, that's not a solution.
That's why I'm saying it's less a question of optimism than it is a question of possibility.
I think the possibility is greater on the side of the evolution that we've been talking about
through migration, through a kind of multi-ethnic consciousness, through the notion of the exchange
rather than the conflict of civilizations.
(58:20):
I think that's the new reality.
And I see my own children, my own students, all of whom are now bi and tricultural.
I mean, there's no such thing as an American.
You know, it's possible really to become many different things.
The question is to develop through the intellect, I think, and this is where the role of the
intellectual is very important, to develop along with that a very sophisticated understanding
(58:41):
of the workings of power, because power itself has become much more complex.
It's not just a matter of armies anymore. It's media, it's advertising.
I mean, look, look at the case of the death of Princess Diana.
I mean, that's a phenomenon that has very little to do in the end with Diana.
And it's not just media.
It's also a kind of super self-spectacle.
I mean, that somehow we can see ourselves in this glorified woman who was really quite a modest,
(59:05):
on the whole, to me, uninteresting person.
And along with her goes the idea of Dodi, who is a kind of Arab, who is a kind of unwanted person who's pushed aside.
He's like, as the New York Times called him, I saw it in Europe in the Herald Tribune, he was described as a footnote.
I mean, so, I mean, one can see these manifestations and it's a matter of, I mean, they've lost and it's hopeless, really. They've won.
(59:29):
You can compare this situation really to the imperialistic situation in the 90s. Absolutely.
Is this closeness from the Western world producing what?
Well, I mean, what it's producing is its own self-reproduction.
I mean, because what you're having then is more insistence upon the triumph of the Western ego,
(59:52):
of the Western identity, whatever that is.
And you get what Adorno used to talk about, the growth of a kind of image of mass society, which
seems completely unaware of what's taking place anywhere else.
I mean, you know, I mean, as in, for example, this, I mean, the demonstration of the funeral
of Princess Di, it's not interested in the rest of the world.
(01:00:14):
It's all about, it's a sort of a self-glorification in a way of the media, the power of the
media and of this particular blonde image, you know, of Diana herself. But we know that.
I mean, that's there, there is much else going on, on a micro level, you know, on a smaller
level, which it is, as I say, the duty of the intellectual.
(01:00:34):
I mean, radio versus television, you see, I mean, radio can do it, but television can't because
television is commercially dominated by the conception of the mass conception of one or two images, simple images.
It's the duty of the intellectual to provide alternatives.
I'm not saying it's easy and I'm not saying it's going to work, but it is also happening.
I noticed that, for example, in Documenta, when I was there last summer, I spoke in Kassel,
(01:00:59):
I noticed there that the resistance of the press was precisely not so much that it was, there
was a lot of third world art, there wasn't, but that this was in some way destroying the notion that art transcends everything.
And that's a Western idea because, I mean, the involvement of art in the everyday, the involvement
of art in the political, the involvement of art in questions of identity is shaking questions of identity.
(01:01:24):
And the notion that the frame has been broken was given a very powerful example in Documenta,
which makes a difference, which changes the perspective.
I mean, it doesn't change it completely, but it begins to to have an influence.
And it's this that we have to count on, continuing that pressure through means of that sort,
rather than just giving up or trying to provide a huge super theory, which will transcend the old one.
(01:01:48):
So in other words, I think it's really a period of the specific and the concrete attached to
particular social and political movements of the oppressed, of the others, of the immigrants,
all of the things that we have been talking about that will make possible the kind of transformation. but it's a bet.
I'm not absolutely certain that it'll take place, but that's the only way it will take place.
(01:02:09):
Cause the other one is going on, you know, this mass society sort of supercapital, transnational
capitalism is going on without interruption.
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