New Review

Check out my new review of Said's "last" work, On Late Style (2006).

http://aspen.conncoll.edu/politicsandculture/page.cfm?key=632

n Lateness and Incompleteness:
Review of Edward Said, On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain. Vintage, 2006.

To call Edward Said’s On Late Style his final book would be misleading. Orientalism (1978), his groundbreaking critique of how the West produces knowledge about the East, is his last book. After this book, Said follows the route taken by Lionel Trilling and R.P. Blackmur: namely, the academic essayist. While the two subsequent projects of The Question of Palestine (1979), and Covering Islam (1981) can be described as books, they are not academic studies in conventional sense. Furthermore, they are more correctly read as a trilogy, a term Said himself used to describe the three texts. His next major work of literary criticism, The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983), becomes a model for many of his books that follow (Humanism and Democratic Criticism, Reflections on Exile, etc). With the possible exception of Culture and Imperialism (1993) it would be fair to say that in addition to the academic fame Orientalism brought him, the book’s publication also effectively marks the beginning of his retirement from the world of traditional academic publishing.[1]

The purpose of the above schematization is not simply to draw a rough outline of Said’s vast career. Indeed, such a schematization would go against the theme of his last work, where the notion of “going against” plays a central role. Rather, it is an attempt to lay the groundwork of my larger argument that this final work is a curious text. That is to say, while it makes perfect sense in terms of a project within the trajectory of Said’s work, it seems to undercut itself because its very subject deals with how artists and intellectuals can go against their own canons. Thus we are left with a curious dilemma: do we read the text, as Said puts it himself, as an example of “art as document—that is, to a reading of the music that stresses ‘reality breaking through’ in the form of history or the composer’s impending death” (9). Alternatively, do we read the text as Said’s own “late style”—which is “what happens if art does not abdicate its rights in favor of reality” (9).

Before we engage this question, it is important to consider the work’s genesis. Miriam Said, his widow, tells us in her foreword to the book that according to her recollection late style “became part of Edward’s conversation sometime at the end of the 1980s” (vii). She also confirms something that is clear to anyone reading the book—that it is an incomplete project. While it is unclear as to the scope of the project, it is safe to say that the work is a fragmentary engagement with the notion of late style. Also unclear is the extent of Michael Wood’s organization and editing. His explanation of his role is illuminating:

The book on late style was unfinished, then, but the materials we have for it are very rich. We can regret what might have been and do our saddened best to imagine what Said might have written if he had written more, but we have no reason to be ungrateful for what there is. In what follows I have put together several sets of materials, but although I have cut and spliced, I have not thought it necessary to write summaries or bridging passages (xviii).

While Wood should be commended for his work, it should not be forgotten that the task of constructing this book out of a set of manuscripts and lectures is indeed an impossible task. Without precise notes explaining the exact emendations, we cannot even be sure of the cadence of the text.

My usage of a musical metaphor is not accidental. Late Style is very much a book about music; more than half the book centers on various figures of classical music and opera: Beethoven, Richard Strauss, Benjamin Britten, Stravinsky, Kurt Weill, Glenn Gould, and Mozart among others. Indeed, Beethoven, Mozart, and Glenn Gould each have chapters that focus on them (the book only has six chapters in total). Indeed, in the first chapter of the book (Said did not pen an introduction), we find the source of Said’s engagement with the notion of late style, namely, Theodor Adorno.

Adorno’s figure looms over the entire project: “For Adorno, lateness is the idea of surviving beyond what is acceptable and normal; in addition, lateness includes the idea that one cannot really go beyond lateness at all, cannot transcend or lift oneself out of lateness, but can deepen the lateness. There is no transcendence or unity” (13). Not only is he the critical source of the work, but he himself embodies late style for Said:

My reading of Adorno, with his reflections about music at its centre, sees him as injecting Marxism with a vaccine so powerful as to dissolve its agitational force almost completely. Not only do the notions of advance and culmination in Marxism crumble under his rigorous negative scorn, but so too does anything that suggests movement at all. With death and senescence before him, with a promising start behind him, Adorno uses the model of late Beethoven to endure ending in the form of lateness but for itself, its own sake, not as a preparation for or obliteration of something else. Lateness is being at the end, full of memory, and also very (even preternaturally) aware of the present. Adorno, like Beethoven, becomes therefore a figure of lateness itself, an untimely, scandalous, even catastrophic commentator on the present (14).

A few pages later, Said maps the term onto his own critical framework well-known to his readers: “Lateness therefore is a kind of self-imposed exile from that which is generally acceptable, coming after it, and surviving beyond it” (16).

Said is careful to caution against rendering lateness as a kind of scorched-earth engagement with one’s past. Lateness is not what the title character of W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz is enacting when he, near the end of his life, takes all the paper his work has generated over his career as an architect and burns them. Said, in an almost moralistic tone, reminds us that “[there] must be a constructive element above all, which animates the procedure” (18).

It should be noted here that much of the opening chapter (and indeed, the whole work) is composed of previously published material. This section on Adorno from which I have culled these lengthy quotations not only captures the central components of late style for Said, but it also bring us back to the dilemma we face as readers of the text. Is Said’s engagement with late Adorno—a deeply personal, almost reverential reading of the man’s work—his own enactment of a late style? Once again, I defer this question and continue with a summary of the book.

In addition to the discussion of music and musicians, the other chapters take up literary figures. However, these are not the canonical figures Said engaged in Culture and Imperialism, but a more eclectic crew. One such figure is Jean Genet. To my knowledge, this essay on Jean Genet, published originally in Grand Street (32), is Said’s only written engagement with him. Like his preceding chapter on Cosi Fan Tutte Said begins on a somewhat personal tone (a gesture I will deal with at the end of this essay), relating his various encounters with Genet, both in America on the steps Columbia’s Low Library and in Beirut during the 1980s. In this essay we once again witness the fragmentary nature of the book. Genet’s relevance to the larger project of late style comes off as unclear for much of the essay. Only towards the end of the essay does Said make this connection: “[In Genet], identity grates against identity, and the dissolution of identity undermines both” (86). In the next paragraph, Said returns to a now familiar figure in the text: “Genet is like that other great modern dissolver of identity, Adorno” (84). Said does not elaborate here on what exactly the dissolution of identity means. This is frustrating because it seems, at least on the surface, to be precisely the kind of critical work Said enjoined—that is, intellectual in exile—upon all critics, irrespective of the time of their lives. While it would be simplistic to conflate the dissolution of identity with exile, there is seemingly a vital connection between them that can be explored.

The above should not be interpreted as a complaint, rather, it is the expression of a certain frustration that comes over anyone—particularly someone familiar with Said’s work—attempting to seriously engage the text. Not only is the text fragmentary—again, I am not attempting to lay blame—but it also seems to elude the professional critic. Most of the reviewers tend to focus only certain parts of the book. We can reasonably assume that the this narrow focus—aside from the politically motivated readings from those more concerned with Said’s anti-Zionism than his work—has much to do with area of intellectual expertise that the particular critic emerges from. Thus Said’s own catholic nature and his wide-ranging talents as a reader, critic, activist, and musician also plays a role in making a critical engagement with the book a frustrating endeavor.

Furthermore, it becomes clear from this work and Musical Elaborations (1991) that Said’s critical engagement with music is amateurish. I use that term not in the pejorative sense but in the same spirit that Said often used it, referring to the original French word relating to act of doing something for the love of it and not for financial gain. Thus reading the text, we shift between two registers of criticism: the professional and amateur. The professional critic is found in his engagement with intellectuals like Adorno and writers like Genet and Lampedusa. The more amateur critic is the Said who engages with music. These two registers have nothing to do with the quality of criticism (i.e., the professional is by definition better equipped), but everything to do with professional training and its effects.

Let us return now to one of the points I have been deferring throughout this essay, namely the personal dimension. As I mentioned earlier, there are many deeply personal moments in the book, moments that seem to go against Said’s own reluctance to over personalize his own critical works. Indeed, Said praises Erich Auerbach’s reticence on the location (Turkey) of the production of his grand study of European literature. We can read Said’s praise of Auerbach as a thinly-veiled critique of those academics and writers who emphasize their personal history in their work.[2] He seems to be following Auerbach in the early sections of the text when he briefly alludes to his own impending death. In the discussion of the universality of what he calls the “three great problematics” of the human “self-making process” (birth, maturity, and lateness)—he says that “for obvious personal reasons lateness is my subject here” (6).

In addition to this, there is Said’s curiously personal rendering of Adorno mid-way through his engagement with him. Up to now, Said’s engagement with Adorno is very much a philosophic engagement—that is, at the level of Adorno’s philosophical and critical work remains the focus. Towards the end of the essay though, Said makes an oddly personal turn: under the pretext of a discussion of Mimima Moralia’s early pages dealing with Proust, the reader gets lost between three critical registers. That is, the boundaries between Said’s discussion of Adorno and Adorno’s discussion of Proust fade away, producing an odd third register: Said discussing himself. For instance, Said quotes at length from Adorno’s discussion of Proust’s wealthy background and how that wealth brought both freedom from traditional profession constraint and resentment from peers. (Indeed, one could call the Proustian figure the ultimate amateur). Said maps this discussion onto Adorno himself arguing that:

On one level his elitist predilections are of course a function of his class background. But on another level what he likes in it , well after his defection from its ranks, is its sense of ease of luxury; this, he implies in Mimima Moralia, allows him a continuous familiarity with great works, great masters, and great ideas, not as subjects of professional discipline but rather as practices indulged by a frequent habitué at a club…Nevertheless, Adorno, like Proust, lived and worked his life next to, and even as part of, the great underlying continuities of Western society: families, intellectual associations, as well as any number of academic institutions. But he was always to one side, never fully a part of any. He was a musician who never had a career as one, a philosopher whose main subject was music. And unlike many of his academic or intellectual counterparts, Adorno never pretended to an apolitical neutrality (21).

It seems less fruitful to debate Said’s representation of Adorno—it seems only fair that Said should have engaged Adorno’s highly fraught relationship with the German student movement of the late 1960s, particularly after reading the Genet chapter—than to highlight the fact that were “Adorno” replaced with “Said” and “philosopher” replaced with “literary critic”, the passage would read almost identically.

This seems like the logical place to return to the recurring question at the heart of this paper, for this confusion between Said and Adorno and the respective engagements with seemingly earlier versions of themselves: how do we read Edward Said’s On Late Style? Can it be called an example of late style, or is simply a late work? Is the production of this text underwritten by the dissolution of identity and a sprit of “going against the grain”? Is Said like the aging Beethoven, going deaf while he composing the Ninth symphony? Or is this a perfectly sensible work for a man who is dying, whose life was concerned not with a kind of scholarship that simply maps the past but the scholarship that constitutes, as Foucault puts its, “a history of the present?” That is to say, is a kind of the work that springs out of the mind who is, as Said once commented, “aware of the shortage of time?” Is the work marked by an “irreconcilability” with the work of the rest of his career? Or does it make sense within his wider concerns?

Thus the question of biography looms in any critical reading of this book. As previously mentioned, we know from Miriam Said that he was thinking about “late style” at the end of the 1980s. In the Wellek Lectures at the University of California, Irvine which he published as Musical Elaborations (1991), he discusses Adorno’s 1938 essay on Beethoven. He held a graduate seminar on late style sometime shortly thereafter. In his introduction, Michael Wood highlights how Said learned of his illness of his after he began thinking about late style, and from this begins considering the same question I am grappling with at the moment. He argues that “[t]houghts of his own death deepened his attachment to the question of late style; they didn’t instigate it. But I do believe these thoughts became part of the projected book’s long and incomplete life. It’s one thing to write of letting go, and another to do it. Explorations of the making of the self can go until the very end; the self’s unmaking is another affair, and late style comes close to that” (xvii) [my emphasis]. Earlier, Wood states that he “can’t believe that he wanted to finish the book. Or rather, he wanted to finish it but was waiting for a time that would perhaps never have come…Completing the work would have been too much like writing the end of a life” (xvi-xvii).

The analogy with exile, albeit a temporal variety and not the spatial exile we often speak about in relations in the context of the nation-state, seems to support the idea that it is indeed a late style. Furthermore, the Auerbachian gesture I discussed earlier when read against Said’s claim that only the exile from Europe could produce a book like Mimesis also supports this claim. Also the seemingly autobiographical reading of Adorno, who, in Said’s view, embodies a kind of lateness in the very act of writing about lateness. All of these examples support the claim that Said himself is performing a kind of lateness.

Against the claim, there is the fact, despite Wood’s claim to the contrary, he learned of his illness after his concern with lateness began. Furthermore, the kind of illness Said suffered does not seem to be conducive to the lateness Adorno, Lampedusa, and Beethoven are coping with. Because Said was relatively young when he was diagnosed (51), and, since, most cancers victims either die relatively quickly or survive their illness, the kind of wasting away we think of with regards to late style does not seem to apply. Finally, there is the point that Said, in Edward Said: the Last Interview, comments that he has tried to go about life despite his illness: “I accept invitations, I buy books with every intention of reading them, and I take on new projects.” Thus it is hard to imagine Said as suffering from the kind of lateness of the other figures he discusses. Wood takes this position, stating how his

sense is that for all [Said’s] deep interest in lateness and his awareness of the shortage of his own time, Said was attracted by the idea of a late, dissolving self. He doesn’t inhabit his last works as “a lamenting personality,” his own phrase in his book for Adorno’s picture for late Beethoven. Said wanted to continue with the self’s making, and if we divide a life in early, middle, and late periods, he was still in the middle when he died at the age of sixty-seven…Still a little too early, I think he would have said, for real lateness” (xvi-xvii).

But in the end, such a discussion is fruitless. I believe that Wood’s comments about the incompleteness of the text are important in any critical discussion of it. Since much of the book itself is an assemblage from mostly already published materials on the part of Said’s colleagues, it gives me pause to even consider this an accurate rendition of what he was thinking on the question of late style. Obviously, this is not a criticism of Wood or Said’s family for choosing to go ahead with the project, rather, I point this out to highlight that based on the materials we have here, it would be impossible to consider if Said’s interest in late style is itself an example of lateness. And despite words warning against such feelings, it is sad that Said only flirted with the idea and was not allowed the time to develop it.

One final note of a rather personal nature: it is curious exercise for me to read the text at the beginning of my career. Reading one dead man (Said) writing about another dead man (Adorno) and his engagement with yet a third dead man (Beethoven) seems to only highlight the point. And while I do not have the same visceral reactions to, say, Beginnings, reading On Late Style has forced me to consider my own current position as critic. This is the true accomplish of the text and all of the individuals who helped create it: that it forces the critic to reflect on not only himself, but also him task.


Notes

[1] The book, with its sprawling nature and timeframe (almost four centuries of literature, culture, history and politics, often times reads like a collection of essays—although a discussion of this is outside the scope of this paper.

[2] This is not to imply that Said was insensitive to the question of historical injustices and the “traces” left upon the individual. Recall the last section of his introduction to Orientalism, (aptly titled “the personal dimension”) where he describes his own implications in the discourse of Orientalism by way of his ethnic, class, and educational background.

Sina Rahmani is a PhD student in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Student TASED at UCLA

Cops Taser UCLA Student
U.S.-Born Student of Iranian Descent Alleges Racial Profiling in Videotaped Incident
By BILL BLAKEMORE

Nov. 17, 2006 — - There is painful six-minute video that has suddenly spread all over the world via YouTube and "click here to watch" buttons on campus newspaper and TV station Web sites and on countless blogs.

It shows part of what happened in front of students who had been studying in the UCLA library when an Iranian-American student reportedly did not show any ID to campus police.

The excruciating video clip makes you want to shut your eyes as you hear sounds that echo those heard during the enflamed 1968 Vietnam-era demonstrations: Enraged students screaming at police; police yelling back and using strong force trying to get students under control.

"Here's your Patriot Act! ... your ... abuse of power!" shouts a student, using profanity after screaming out in anguished pain from the electric jolts of a police Taser.

"Stand up or you'll get Tasered again!" the police shout back.

"I said I would leave," the student moans loudly, as appalled fellow students crowd in, some demanding the badge numbers of the police.

It's not clear from the video whether the student is unable to stand up because of the initial Taser shock -- a nerve-stunning jolt that can immobilize muscles for a several seconds.

One difference from the anti-war demonstrations that reached a peak in 1968 -- this time the demonstrations are recorded by cell phone cameras and mini digital video cameras and then disseminated on the Internet:

To watch the video, click here.

Lawsuit Alleges 'Brutal Excessive Force' and Profiling

"We are joining a group of students today to demand an independent investigation of this incident," Hussam Aylush, who heads the Southern California office of the Council on American Islamic Relations, told ABC News.

Aylush told us his office has received "lot of e-mails and phone calls from students and parents, expressing a lot of anxiety and concern about what happened."

"Parents and the community have the right to expect that their children are going to be safe when they are on campus," he added.

Civil rights lawyer Stephen Yagman hired by the student, Mostafa Tabatabainejad, says he will file a federal civil rights lawsuit against the UCLA police, accusing them of "brutal excessive force" and of singling him out because of his Middle Eastern appearance.

What actually happened at the library?

"I think we need to focus on the actions of the person, not just what you're hearing on the tape as far as the words," University of California Police Department Assistant Chief Jeff Young told ABC News affiliate KABC-TV.

"He had refused to identify himself; he had refused to leave the library, and he also -- when he was escorted by the officers at first -- he went limp, which is a form of resistance," Young said.

Some students saw it differently.

"Tabatabainejad was also stunned with the Taser when he was already handcuffed," complained third-year student Carlos Zaragoza to UCLA's campus paper, the Daily Bruin.

"You could just forcefully ask them to leave without having to Taser them... and dehumanizing them that way," student Virginia Myers told the ABC News affiliate.

"I think the UCPD went way too far," she added.

But if the Internet means such explosive video spreads instantly everywhere, it also means debate about it can follow right behind:

"In my opinion, he was asking for it," writes UCLA student columnist David Lazar, who concludes that when the student refused to present ID "during a routine check... it created an uproar, the fallout of which has graced airwaves and prompted headlines internationally."

"Whether or not the police used excessive force, there is no doubt that the student showed a blatant disregard of UCLA's regulations and police authority," he writes in UCLA's Daily Bruin, which like many college papers these days, is available to the world online.

Tasers Also Increasingly Controversial

Tasers didn't exist in 1968 -- police used batons, which Young told reporters are more forceful than Tasers.

"It's an electrical shock... it causes pain," Young said, explaining that the officers used the "drive stun" setting, which delivers a shock to a specific part of the body.

UCLA's student journalists quickly produced quotes from Southern California ACLU attorney Peter Eliasberg.

"It's a real mistake to treat a Taser as some benign thing that painlessly brings people under control," the ACLU attorney said. "The Taser can be incredibly violent and result in death."

Tasers are increasingly controversial -- a powerful means of control for police that is apparently sometimes too powerful.

While it is often referred to as a "non-lethal" weapon, the Arizona Republic newspaper in Phoenix reported a study that found that since 1999, 84 people in the United States and Canada have died after being shocked by a Taser.

Manufacturers Promote Tasers at UCLA

Four of UCLA's nearly 60 full-time police officers recently won "Taser Awards," given by the manufacturers of the electronic shock device to "law enforcement officers who save a life in the line of duty through extraordinary use of the Taser," according to the Los Angeles Times.

"University police are investigating..." says a statement released by UCLA Acting Chancellor Norman Abrams. "Investigators are reviewing the incident and the officers' actions. The investigation and review will be thorough and fair."

"I realize... these kind of arrest tapes don't always show the full picture," anthropology student Ali Ghandour told the campus newspaper. "But... it's a ridiculous amount of force for someone being escorted because they forgot their BruinCard."

Recent Events at UCLA

This is something I submitted to the Daily Bruin regarding the recent sad events at UCLA.

On Shutting up

Sina Rahmani
Grad Student
Comparative Literature

Let us begin with a few statements that should be more than obvious regarding the recent incident at Powell Library. Firstly, Mostafa Tabatabainejad was very misguided in trying to argue his way out of being asked to leave. Moreover, I am more than certain that his recent claim that his refusal was not a misguided example of bravado, but rather a statement against racial profiling. This is clearly an example of some artful two-stepping on the part of an overeager attorney eager to wash Mr. Tabatabainejad’s hands of any culpability in this matter and maximize his client’s litigious potentiality.
Secondly, the actions on the part of the UCPD were utterly abhorrent and crossed all boundaries of reasonable law enforcement. Obviously, the police officers involved were clearly negligent or were not trained properly. UCLA’s image in the recent days has taken a major body blow because of the actions of these officers, and the memories of the event will mostly likely haunt the school for a long time to come.
More interesting to me is a moment near the end of that chilling video where an officer is being chastised by a student disturbed by the incident. Clearly frustrated and overwhelmed by the situation, the officer threatens the student with a tasing unless he shuts up.
While I dismayed at the entire incident, I find that in this exchange we can clearly see what is most disturbing about the situation—for it is precisely here that we step out of a relatively silly situation into the realm of politics and the undercurrent of fear that pervades this country; a fear that virtually constitutes not only traditional representative politics at the moment (thus, a vote for the Democrats is a vote for Iranian nuclear ambitions), but also, more generally, the everyday encounters between subjects and the state.
One of the fundamental ideological supports of the liberal state is the notion of “accountability.” The state may have certain powers over you, but you have a certain degree of recourse built into the system to ensure that we do not find ourselves in a totalitarian society. If a given county, state, or national populace is not happy with a certain government, the next round of elections presents an opportunity to address those concerns. Of course, the notion of accountability is reliant upon one more fundamental condition: the ability of subjects to speak. Voting, at the risk of sounding banal, is, more or less, a moment of speech. But, whereas voting is done on the state’s terms (you can only vote for those parties that are deemed to be legitimate), there is a much more potent form of speech: protest.
A protest is one of the most basic acts of democracy. Not only does it remind everyone of the ownership of public space (streets, parks, government buildings), but it reminds those watching the protest that there is indeed something wrong. Thus, the protest is a much more dangerous speech act than the casting of a vote.
This is precisely why I highlight the dangers of that short exchange of words—for it encapsulates how little tolerance for protest that the state has at the moment. Also, it highlights the ideological sleight of hand coded into our language. A taser, we are told, in the hands of the state, is a defensive tool—both for the officer holding it and for the subjects who are ostensibly served by that officer. What this exchange exposed was how, during a very tense moment, the defensive tool can instantly become a weapon of encouragement and submission.
While some may argue that to turn the event into an allegory of post-9/11 America would be hyperbolic, it is indeed no accident that this happens at a time when citizens are bombarded with color-coded charts reminding us of the dangers of the present. Everyday we are reminded how “dangerous” the world is how our “enemies” hate our freedoms and will stop at nothing to harm us.
But whom shall we fear more? Think of that shameful moment in American history where the NYPD was deployed to disrupt the protests against the Republican convention in 2004. Think of the massive wiretapping operations recently exposed. Think of the countless immigrants from the Arab and Islamic world rounded up like cattle in the wake of 9/11 and deported on meaningless immigration charges.
Thus, with this example we are painfully reminded that for the majority of the population, the most potent danger is not some swarthy man who lives in the caves of central Asia. Rather, the danger we face is from the very state that claims to protect us. And lest we choose not to shut up, we can be painfully reminded of this intolerance for protest very quickly.