Hermeneutical Trajectories from the Third World: Aijaz Ahmad on

Aijaz Ahmad has made serious critical interventions in Marxist and Postcolonialist readings of literature and culture. His book, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (1992) has made significant contribution to the postcolonial critical debates. It is a collection of critical articles with deliberations on postcolonial theory from different perspectives. In this book, one article on Edward Said discusses Said’s contribution to postcolonial discourse in the paradigm of Western influence on Eastern cultural narratives. Ahmad argues that Said’s critical writings on orientalism suffer from inconsistencies, overgeneralizations and selective applications. These methodological aberrations, Ahmad asserts, have shaped the trajectories of Said’s critical oeuvre. He criticizes Said for adopting western theoretical models for the cultural analysis and interpretations which are deeply immersed in the capitalist power structures. Ahmad accuses him of appropriating the western knowledge-structures for theorizing the Orient. His analysis of Said goes beyond the limits of critical debates as he questions Said’s vocation and space. He, in effect, considers Said an inauthentic critical voice. According to Ahmad, Said’s successful career in the West has rendered him incapable of a genuine engagement with the Orient. In this paper, I have attempted a critical re-reading of Ahmad’s arguments to suggest that Ahmad’s criticism of Said is intentionally provocative, seeking attention without engaging with Said’s theoretical perspectives in a comprehensive manner.

Ahmad's mission to effect a break with the existing theoretical formulation" in the discussion of imperialism, derives from his allegation that this is now in the hands of literary theorists who practice "a post modern anti-colonial derisive of Marxist discourse." While such a charge is not without cause, it relies on conflating related but distinct and internally diverse disciplines (Parry 121).
Ahmad's argument against the advocates of poststructuralist and postmodernist conceptions of material history is based on the fact that this brand of postcolonial inquiry is quite reductive and is devoid of any historical or political meaning. It completely disregards material reality, global power imbalances and unequal distribution of wealth and has become a mere jargon, "simply a polite way of saying not-white, not-Europe, or perhaps not-Europe but-inside-Europe" (Ahmad 8).
The book was an instant success in the academia and it caught the imagination of the best-known minds in the field of literary enquiry. In India, it became a celebrated text as it filled the gap of critical engagement with the West that has existed for a long time. The reception was almost euphoric as the academicians celebrated a critical mind from the hinterland of India who can take on the grand narratives of literary theory, especially from the dominant groups like the post-colonists, the deconstructionists and others. This kind of reception of Aijaz Ahmad by the academia is justified considering the almost negligible serious critical engagements in Indian academic environment.
There is a kind of fascination with Karl Marx in these post-capitalist times. Marx is a symbol of redemption from guilt, the guilt of not doing enough for the marginalized. I disagree with him so fundamentally on issues both of theory and of history that our respective understanding of the worldthe world as it is now is, and as it has been at many points over past two thousand years or soare simply irreconcilable (159).
On scrutiny, after the celebration, even in the Indian context, we realize that Ahmad's In Theory, especially his criticism of Said's Orientalism, is exclusionary, authoritative and self-contradictory in nature rather than analytical and substantial. It seems more of a critic who is desperate to stage dramatic reversals and rushes to indulge in critical engagement leading to the unsubstantiated conclusions.
In this paper, I attempt to analyze Ahmad's reading of Said in his article "Orientalism and After" to demonstrate that Ahmad's readings of Said cannot be considered as sincere, honest and productive criticism.  Ahmad is strongly critical of Said's self description as the 'Oriental subject' which he finds "somewhat one-sided and therefore somewhat hazardous for anyone whose own cultural apparatus is so overwhelmingly European and who commands such an authoritative presence in the American university" (Ahmad 173).
Such polemical assertions on the part of a critic are obviously attempts to discredit the rich dividends that the cultural critics of oriental identity are capable of. By implication, is Ahmad trying to assert that a critical mind need to be ensconced in the primitive settings of both Orientalism and colonialisn" (164) and thus he commits the sin of essentializing the west: The particular texture of Orientalism, its emphasis on the canonical text, its privileging of literature and philology in the construction of 'Orientalist' knowledge and indeed the human sciences generally, its will to portray a West which has been the same from the dawn of history to the present and its will to traverse all the main languages of Europeall this, and more, in Orientalism derives from the ambition to write a counter-history that could be posed against Auerbach's Mimesis, a magisterial account of the seamless genesis of European realism and rationalism from the Greek antiquity to the modernist movement (Ahmad 163).
c) According to Ahmad, Said's attempt to write a counter history of European rationalism is marked by ambivalence and paradoxes. This paradox is played on a larger and more complex level in Said's perspective on European High Humanism. On the one hand, he finds European Humanist literature an accomplice in "the inferiorization of the 'Orient'' (Ahmad 164), on the other he seems to be preoccupied with "the canonical author, with tradition, with sequential periodization" (168) and thus endorses the values of humanist liberalism like accommodation, tolerance, cultural pluralism and so on and so forth: "…humanism-asideality is invoked at the same time when humanism-as-history has been rejected so unequivocally" (Ahmad 164). Erich Auerbach, who is to be represented as the master of European hegemonic knowledge in Said's discourse, becomes an "absent anti-hero", "the emblem of scholarly rectitude, a lone figure defending humanist value in the midst of holocaust" (Ahmad163). Ahmad is highly critical of Said's tendency of alternating between inordinate praise and wholesale rejection: Occident there was a relative superiority of the west in terms of its position and hegemony of ideas (Nambiar "Renegotiating") Ahmad observes that Said's approach to Marxism is also marked by the same ambivalence. According to Ahmad, Said tries to bring together a number of irreconcilable theoretical and political positions like those of Julien Benda, "the rabid anti-communist" and Antonio Gramsci, "one of the more persevering communists of the century" (Ahmad 170).
On the one hand, Benda "a man possessed by notions of High Aesthetics", has been praised by Said as "one of the exemplary intellectuals of this century" (Ahmad 169) and on the other, he has been equated with Antonio Gramsci, whose Marxist leanings are quite conspicuous.
Ahmad views this as Said's way of "domesticating the revolutionary content of Gramsci's thought" (Ahmad 169).
This also appears to be a misreading of Said, Benda, Gramsci and others who understand the unholy alliance that the power-structures make with the intelligentsia and academia. The intellectuals on the side of power help in legitimizing the brute power in all its cruel acts. During Hitler's rule, the role of intelligentsia serves as a befitting example. Hence, this kind of polarization of the aestheticians and the intellectuals that Ahmad indulges in seems to be an intentional distortion of two separate intellectual spaces. d) Indulging in polemical criticism, Ahmad also accuses Said of generalizations, the "homogenizing sweep" (Ahmad 197), which at times seems contradictory and ambiguous.
Said proposes Orientalism as a kind of discourse, but at the same time he seems to follow the Similarly, as Ahmad points out, Said strategically uses words like 'we' and 'us' in different contexts to refer to Palestinians, Third World intellectuals, academics in general, humanists, Arabs, Arab-Americans, and the American citizens at large. The phrase, 'the Oriental subject' is arbitrarily appropriated as 'the colonial subject', and later as 'the postcolonial subject'. By criticizing Said's use of such terms in his theoretical discourse, Ahmad deliberately ignores the functional aspects of language and rhetoric that is used in critical debates. In the narratives of identity, the pronouns like "I" and "we" are common features of language. In no way these terms can be considered inappropriate or unjustifiable as the context in which Said theorizes on the postcolonial subjectivities necessitates such usages. In fact, Ahmad exposes his own triviality by making such spurious arguments. e) Ahmad accuses Said of theoretical eclecticism which "runs increasingly out of control" (Ahmad 200). According to Ahmad, Said borrows his language and his content from so many calls Orientalism "a deeply flawed book". I think one cannot be more 'flawed' than Ahmad. I conclude with a quote from Benita Parry.
I am distressed, therefore, that Ahmad's collection of essays obliges me to write a review where an inventory of errors, reductive procedures, and rancor must take precedence over consideration of the perspectives it might otherwise have offered to the continuing theorization of imperialism. Ahmad's critique relies on 'conflating related but distinct and internally diverse disciplines: Colonial Discourse Analysis, Theories of Third World Literature, Subaltern Studies, researches into African-American culture, -even Salman Rushdie's fiction is included. Ahmad's procedure is to distort the theoretical paradigms of these various inquiries, and then to impugn the intellectual authority of protagonists by attributing the provenance of their thinking to comprador class origins and subsequent "embourgeoisement" within the elite academic institutions of the metropolis (Parry 121).