Introduction: Speaking the Truth to Power

Speaking the Truth to Power

Introducing the 2021 Edward W. Said Days

Prof. Dr. Mena Mark Hanna

“Believe me, the zombies are more terrifying than the settlers,”1 Frantz Fanon, the Martiniquais psychiatrist and political theorist writes in The Wretched of the Earth. It is a chilling sentiment, one written with annihilating concision. Those who no longer think for themselves and abdicate the responsibility of colonial struggle for the mythic and religious are more dangerous than those recognized as enemies or interlopers. Fanon is pressing forward: do not relinquish an inch of territory to the past but push the present to independence and equal justice. On top of this already substantial charge, Fanon pitches the struggle to be not only between the colonizer and the colonized, but also between the colonized and the colonized-cum-zombie, turning a binary power structure normally painted in brushstrokes of self and other into a multiplicated free-for-all of immanent threats.

Edward W. Said, too, in his urgent delivery and tempered philosophical outlook, exhorts basic human justice for everyone. He finds the contours and arguments for this fundamental right litigated in the cultural products of the past, be they the pages of Victorian novels, the theories of French historiography, the scenes of Italian opera, or the philosophies of German metaphysics. One could make the mistake to presume that Said’s work regarding culture and power is historiographical. That is not the case. Though the era of high–19th century imperialism is over, as Said points out in his 1993 book Culture and Imperialism, the imperial past—as political, social, cultural, and psychic presence—is still very much with us. It has

“entered the reality of hundreds of millions of people, where its existence as shared memory and as a highly conflictual texture of culture, ideology, and policy still exercises tremendous force.”2

For Said, prosecuting the case for basic human justice falls, inordinately, on the shoulders of the intellectual. And for the purpose of this mission, Said draws a sharp distinction between the specialist and the intellectual: a specialist is one with insider knowledge and vocabulary, who “toes the line” and signals company loyalty; an intellectual, unencumbered by over-specialization, has freedom to dissent, to attempt to arbitrate, and, most importantly, to choose to support the causes and ideas that conform to the principles and values to which they adhere. In his 1993 Reith Lectures, published as Representations of the Intellectual, Said claims: “Speaking the truth to power is no Panglossian idealism: it is carefully weighing the alternatives, picking the right one, and then intelligently representing it where it can do the most good and cause the right change.”3

Nearly three decades after his Reith Lectures and the publication of Culture and Imperialism, one could potentially hazard a step further. Not only are we dealing with the legacy of our imperial past, but that past—and particularly our inability to reckon with it—has come home to roost politically in the metropoles. Both “Make America Great Again” and Brexit are movements that indulge some narrative of an earlier triumphant age, and in both instances, cultural products, debates, and discourses are enmeshed in political power and instrumentalized by politicians. Instead of Fanon’s zombies of the mythic or religious, we have become zombies of glib, instantaneous reflection, with technological weapons of surveillance and misinformation far more devastating to our cultural and political ecosystem than Fanon or Said could have ever imagined.

This year’s Edward W. Said Days, styled as Culture and Power, is perhaps the broadest and most extrapolatory iteration of the festival to date. Whereas past editions of the Said Days have had a relatively focused remit,4 in Culture and Power we attempt to look at the relationship between culture and power first commented upon by Said in his 1983 book The World, the Text, and the Critic: “And that is the power of culture by virtue of its elevated or superior position to authorize, to dominate, to legitimate, demote, interdict, and

validate: in short the power of culture to be an agent of, and perhaps the main agency for, powerful differentiation within its domain and beyond it too.”5

It is not lost on me that the venue of a concert hall and music conservatory does have its own stake in the relationship explored here. Concert halls are in-and-of-themselves representative of culture in an “elevated or superior position.” Music conservatories are purveyors and perpetuators of a hallowed, rarefied performance tradition, forged and regulated by rigorous technical training. What better place than this institution in which to begin to question and subvert these structures?

We have purposefully curated music and art that is entangled with political and national authority. Works of purely electronic music by Karlheinz Stockhausen and Sofia Gubaidulina and sound art by Alvin Lucier tend to be artifacts heard on headphones, not “performed” in concert halls. Richard Wagner’s position as a radical 19th-century nationalist is set aside a composer he denigrated for having Jewish roots, Felix Mendelssohn. We explore works by György Ligeti, György Kurtág, and Dmitri Shostakovich, composers who dealt with—and in the case of Ligeti, escaped—regimes that sought to bend artistic expression to serve authoritarian personality. Abdo Shanan, in his exhibition Dry, explores questions of Algerian identity that crack under the imposition of a governmental project of forced homogenization. Leyla Bouzid, in her film À peine j’ouvre les yeux (“As I Open My Eyes”), portrays a young Tunisian woman finding her voice in the country’s punk rock scene shortly before the uprising that ushered in the Arab Spring. We end with the music of Julius Eastman, a black gay composer who strove to subvert the canon of Classical Music and died inconspicuously, abandoned.

Lest we forget, Edward W. Said’s work, too, has become canon. His ideas—though a necessary fuel to push discourses to be inclusive—have been essentialized, mishandled, subjected to their own orthodoxy. Said seemed to be prescient of some of the measures that would be invoked in his name, reflecting upon his contribution to “the critique of Eurocentrism, which has enabled readers and critics to see the relative poverty of identity politics, the silliness of affirming the ‘purity’ of an essential essence, and the utter falseness

of ascribing to one tradition a kind of priority, which in reality cannot be truthfully asserted, over all the others.”6

If there is a lesson to be learned from the Palestinian exile’s life, 18 years on from his passing in 2003, it is in his urging of equanimity, his plea to see things from the other side and to have “an awareness of simultaneous dimensions, an awareness that—to borrow a phrase from music—is contrapuntal.”7 But also, to see it in style, with aplomb and worldly illumination.

Berlin, September 1, 2021

1 Fanon, Frantz: The Wretched of the Earth [1961], Penguin, London 1990, p. 43. 2 Said, Edward W.: Culture and Imperialism, Knopf, New York 1993, p. 12. 3 Said, Edward W.: Representations of the Intellectual. The 1993 Reith Lectures, Pantheon,

New York 1994, p. 102. 4 On Late Style (2018) focused almost exclusively on ideas of artistic lateness and maturity as expounded upon by Said in his last critical work On Late Style. On

Counterpoint (2019) explored Said’s application of the concept of counterpoint beyond the domain of music. 5 Said, Edward W.: The World, the Text, and the Critic, Harvard University Press,

Cambridge 1983, p. 9. 6 Said, Edward W.: Reflections on Exile and Other Literary and Cultural Essays, Granta,

London 2000, p. 25. 7 Ibid., p. 186.