Guerrilla History - Representations of the Intellectual: Part 1

Episode Date: February 4, 2022

In this Intelligence Briefing, the guys go over Edward Said's book Representations of the Intellectual, which was based on his 1993 series of Reith Lectures.  This book focuses on the conceptions of intellectuals and the roles that they should play within society.  A very fun conversation, on a very important work!  Part 2 of this conversation will be coming out as a Patreon Exclusive episode very soon. You can listen to Said's series of Reith Lectures for free here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00gxr1s  Guerrilla History- Intelligence Briefings will be roughly a twice monthly series of shorter, more informal discussions between the hosts about topics of their choice.  Patrons at the Comrade tier and above will have access to all Intelligence Briefings. Your hosts are immunobiologist Henry Hakamaki, Professor Adnan Husain, historian and Director of the School of Religion at Queens University, and Revolutionary Left Radio's Breht O'Shea. Follow us on social media!  Our podcast can be found on twitter @guerrilla_pod.  Your contributions make the show possible to continue and succeed!  Please encourage your comrades to join us, which will help our show grow. To follow the hosts, Henry can be found on twitter @huck1995, and also has a patreon to help support himself through the pandemic where he breaks down science and public health research and news at https://www.patreon.com/huck1995.  Adnan can be followed on twitter at @adnanahusain, and also runs The Majlis Podcast, which can be found at https://anchor.fm/the-majlis and the Muslim Societies-Global Perspectives group at Queens University, https://www.facebook.com/MSGPQU/.   Breht is the host of Revolutionary Left Radio, which can be followed on twitter @RevLeftRadio cohost of The Red Menace Podcast, which can be followed on twitter at @Red_Menace_Pod.  You can find and support these shows by visiting https://www.revolutionaryleftradio.com/. Thanks to Ryan Hakamaki, who designed and created the podcast's artwork, and Kevin MacLeod, who creates royalty-free music.

You remember Den Bamboo? No! The same thing happened in Algeria, in Africa. They didn't have anything but a rank. The French had all these highly mechanized instruments of warfare. But they put some guerrilla action on. Gorilla History. The podcast that acts as a reconnaissance report of global proletarian history and aims to use the lessons of history to analyze the present. This is a guerrilla history

intelligence briefing. Our intelligence briefings are roughly twice a month. Patreon bonus content, about one episode a month goes out early access on Patreon, and then the other one is a Patreon exclusive as a thank you to the people who help support this show. I'm your host, Henry Huckimacki, joined by my co-hosts, as always, Professor Adnan Hussein, history. historian and director of the School of Religion at Queen's University in Ontario, Canada. Hello, Adnan. How are you doing today? How is it in the Great White North up there in Canada? Oh, I'm doing well. Yes, it is minus 22 centigrade. I don't even know what that is in Fahrenheit because I never needed to know temperatures this low on that scale, but it's great. It's

great to be with you. Yeah, nice seeing you. Also joined, as always, by Brett O'Shea, host of Revolutionary Left radio and co-host of the Red Menace podcast. Hello, Brett. How are you in the probably still white, but not north? How is Nebraska holding up? Yeah, it's good. It's interesting because we're in Russia, Canada, and the U.S. I mean, within the U.S., Omaha is quite north. It's actually latitudinally in line with New York City. But compared to most of Russia and Canada, it's south. But it's frigid, fucking cold out here. But the benefit of that is ice fishing. So I got a little in yesterday. I'm going to try to get a little in tonight as well. Yeah, yeah, I've been looking at the temperatures periodically of where you guys are, and I've seen that it's pretty cold where both

of you are, although, you know, I'm at the 56th parallel. So cold here is a, it's a different scale, it's a different scale entirely. In any case, let's get into our topic for today, which is representations of the intellectual. This is a work by Edward Said. It was based on a series of wreath lectures or writh lectures, not sure on the pronunciation, from 1993. And it was compiled eventually then into a book. And I know that my co-hosts both have their books right in front of them. So just briefly to introduce this series, the book or the lecture series, as I mentioned is the Reith Lectures. And it's an annual lecture series that's hosted by the BBC. It's taken place every year except for two since 1948. The only two years that it

didn't take place. One year was because Stephen Hawking was ill and he was scheduled to be the speaker. And the other year was, interestingly, 1992, it was the year before Edward Said's lecture series, where the BBC, and I'm going to quote them, couldn't find anybody to host the lecture series that year, which is a very strange admission from the BBC that they just couldn't find anybody to do this supposedly prestigious lecture series. But in any case, It's been hosted every year since 1948 other than those two years. And in 1993, Edward Saeed, which Adnan, I'll turn to you in just a second to introduce who Edward Saeed was, hosted the six-part series of lectures. You can find them on the BBC website.

And they go under the title representations of the intellectual. The six parts of the series are representations of the intellectual, holding nations and traditions at bay, intellectual, intellectual exile. ex-patriots and marginals, professionals and amateurs, speaking truth to power, and gods that always fail. And I know that as we get into this conversation about this work that Edward Saeed gave as a series of lectures and then, as I said, was compiled into the books. We'll talk about probably most of, if not all of these individual components in turn. So Adnan, why don't I turn to you now?

And can you briefly just remind the listeners or tell the listeners if they're unaware of who Edward Saeed is? because you've done some work on Edward Saeed on your other podcast, The Mudgellus. Yeah, that's right. We dedicated episode 13 of the Mudgellis to a new biography by Professor Timothy Brennan of Edward Saeed's life called Places of Mind. So you can check that out. I collaborated with a friend and colleague, David Schmidt, who teaches literature,

and we talked a little bit about his life in the context of this biography. but for those who aren't familiar with Edward Said's life and thought, he was a Palestinian intellectual. I guess you could say Palestinian-American, because most of his career, as a literary scholar, a professor of English, was at Columbia University in New York City, but he was born in Palestine, in Jerusalem,

where his family was from. It was an Anglophone, Anglican, kind of Palestinian family. They were Christians. His father was a businessman, and so he grew up sort of between Egypt and Lebanon and Palestine in his youth before, of course, the creation of the state of Israel, after which he, like so many Palestinians, were exiles from their own land. If they were not expelled, they certainly, if they were already outside, they were not allowed to return to their homes in Palestine. He was educated in the U.S. and became a literary scholar and a public intellectual.

The first part of his career really was his literary interpretations, and he wrote some useful and important books on Joseph Conrad, and is one of the figures most closely associated with the emergence of post-colonial literature and scholarship on post-colonialism. But increasingly, he also became an advocate for Palestine and Palestinian human rights and an intellectual figure who had an oppositional politics. And these kind of came together in a way in his most famous book, which is something probably people have come across Orientalism, which is about the representation of the East

in colonial Western European cultures and the way in which an image and a way of framing the East was a form of knowledge in literature, art, and scholarship of supporting colonial control of the other and the East. And that was a absolute bestseller and has had a huge and dramatic impact, you might say, on the humanities and social sciences in the second half of the 20th and early 21st century. And he is probably one of the major intellectuals in terms of his popularity, his influence of the second half of the 20th century. And, you know, he suffered a great deal as a result of his pro-Palestinian stance. And something that we might get into talking a little bit about in terms of the oppositional, you know, intellectual,

is he himself, after the Oslo Accords were signed in the early 1990s, a 1992 or three, I always forget the exact year, but he himself brought, broke with the PLO and with Yasser Arafat, with whom he had been associated as a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council and a real voice and advocate in the West, he became a critic of the Oslo Peace Accords and, you know, suffered in some ways not only from the Zionists with whom he had been, you know, whom he suffered criticism from for his advocacy of Palestine, advocacy for Palestine, but also the established authorities in the PA, the Palestine authority for his oppositional and dissident criticism of the Oslo Accords.

Before his death at, I think, age 68 to leukemia in the mid-late 2000s. I'm forgetting the exact date. Oh, sorry, he died in 2000. 2003. That's right. Yeah, good, good summary. And again, listeners, you should check out of Nan's other podcast, the Mudge list if you want more on Edward Saeed, because it was a very in-depth interview and a really enjoyable one. I remember listening to it when I was still in Germany. Brett, I'm going to turn it to you now. I know that we're going to try to hit as many of these things in this book as we can because there's a lot to say about each of the sections. But I know that you want to open with the first chapter, which is what the lecture series itself is named as. after representations of the intellectual. So I'll just turn it over to you and feel free to take it however you want it. Yeah, well, first, based on what Adnan said, in this text, there's a lot of discussion about how Islam is viewed, how the Arab world is viewed by the West. And these lectures were done in 93, right? So we're talking Gulf War era. Certainly some of these threads were

already on the table, but they would explode after 9-11 and in the war on terrorism and in so many ways still hound and live on in Western and American and French, et cetera, politics to this day. I mean, the rise of the far right in Germany and in France and the U.S. cannot be separated from a deep-seated Islamophobia that came out of the war on terrorism. And as with Saeed's work in general, this covers a lot of those themes in very prescient ways that would later develop. But yeah, this book is really interesting. I read it several years ago. I always loved it. There's some challenging things we can get into later, especially towards people that are listening like communists. Not that he was a fervent anti-communist. He often critiqued to the zealotry

of anti-communism, but he was not by any means a communist and critiqued pitfalls that intellectuals could fall into. So we'll get to that. But what is he trying to do in this book? Well, he's trying to investigate what is an intellectual? What role does an intellectual play in a society, how does the nationality, culture, ethnicity of an intellectual come into play and what should an intellectual focus on and what should an intellectual reject? And so this is a really interesting book for thinking people in general. And the very beginning of the book, the first chapter representations of the intellectual, he's going over some common ideas from other intellectuals about what intellectualism or what an

intellectual is. And as he goes through them, he talks about some of the, you know, Gramsci and Sart and things that he can take from them, but ultimately props up his own sort of informed but unique definition of what he thinks an intellectual is and in ways that disagree with some of these preceding attempts to define the intellectual while taking on board the obvious, you know, insights that they had. So just to, I just want to like get some basic definitions on the table that that he uses in the first chapter of the book, just so we know what he thinks the intellectual is, and that will help inform the rest of our discussion. So let me see here. He says, let me see. He says, I also, I want to insist that the intellectual is an individual with a

specific public role in society that cannot be reduced simply to being a faceless professional, a competent member of a class just going about their business. The central fact for me is, I think, that the intellectual is an individual endowed with a faculty for representing, embodying, articulating a message, a view, an attitude, philosophy, or an opinion as well as for a public. He talks about the need for the intellectual to always be on the side of the vulnerable, of the marginalized, of the weak, to be a voice of the voiceless in a sort. To advance, he says the purpose of the intellectual is to advance human freedom and knowledge. So what arises out of Saeed's definition of an intellectual is an intellectual inherently engaged

with politics, an individual willing to put his neck out on the line, to ruffle feathers, to not be co-opted by the powers that be, but rather to challenge the powers that be. I'm not in a brainless contrarian way, but always in a principled way that's seeking truth, no matter who it offends or who it bothers. And he talks about how certain intellectuals can easily be co-opted and put to the service of governments and corporations, as we see all the time, but the real intellectual, and you can tell by the people he puts on the front of the cover, you know, James Baldwin, Malcolm X, Sartre, Bavar, Virginia Woolf, etc. These are countercultural figures inherently. They're not here to appease or make people feel comfortable, but they're here

for the ruthless criticism of all that exists, as Marx might say, and the advancement of truth in the face of any contenders whatsoever. And for thinking people in general, whether or not you consider yourself an intellectual and Edward Said's definition of it. It's really helpful to think through how you should be applying your intellect, right? How you should be orienting yourself to your overall society and world. And he also emphasizes the importance of universalizing struggles. You know, if you, for example, are Palestinian and you are an intellectual primarily on the global stage or in the West or wherever you may be advocating relentlessly for Palestinian rights and dignity and self-determination, you have to be able to also universalize that struggle

and not place your particular group in a special superior place to other groups. Like, this is what the specificities of oppression in Palestine look like, but this is similar to the struggle over here, this struggle in this African country, this struggle in this Asian country. So it's always moving towards a universalizing, you know, stand against all injustice, even if you have to articulate it through the particularities of the group you have to. to be representing or speaking for. So, you know, there's lots more to be said, but I think that's a good opening salvo to orient yourself to what Saeed is doing in this rather short text, just over

100 pages. If I may jump into more or less ask some questions of you guys, because, you know, I know that you both gone through the work, as have I, but I'm really interested in your insights into it. The first question, I kind of have an answer to myself, but I think that you'd probably me more eloquent and stating it for the audience, which is, can one of you lay out the different conceptions of the intellectual as put forth by Gramsci as well as by Julian Benda? Because he put these forth within the first chapter is really the two competing notions of what an intellectual is in society in terms of, you know, they were conceived by these two individuals, but those two ideas that were conceived really came forward all the way until the present. And then there was

essentially these two competing schools of thought. Again, you know, that's my interpretation of what he was saying, feel free to disagree with me. But these are two very different viewpoints of what an intellectual is. And again, I feel like you would be much more coherent in trying to lay out what those two conceptions are than I would be. But then I'm also interested in, as Brett you mentioned with this quote, and ironically, I had the exact same quote pulled up to go through. So yeah, not surprising considering that was the central thesis of this first essay or the first lecture. But one thing that kind of comes up periodically

throughout the series of lectures and comes into play here as well, I think, a little bit. And this is more of an opinion-based question, is as you mentioned, he finds the, he conceives the role of the intellectual to be somebody who fights against power, who stands up for the everyday person. Yes, this is the common thread throughout this entire work.

But he also at some points really lays out, that these people shouldn't have like a set ideology and perhaps I'm oversimplifying his view there. But at some points, he really tries to say that, you know, these intellectuals shouldn't have an actual ideology that they, that they publicly ascribed to to kind of get into a camp of sorts. And it's very interesting for me because there are some ideologies, you know, probably that we more or less share with each other and that many of our listeners share with us that I don't think they're mutually exclusive, a fighting for the everyday person in fighting against power, you know, these liberatory ideologies. But he very much at several points in the series of lectures

and series of essays kind of pushes against the idea of intellectuals having an ascribed ideology, which is also interesting considering, and this is just kind of a tangent from me, that he holds up Noam Chomsky, for example, in several points, at one point in particular that I remember. And this is despite Chomsky's, you know, anarcho-sindicalism or just syndicalist ideology, which he had been fairly well associated with, and I believe had publicly stated for decades at that point prior to these lectures. And he doesn't mention that at any point when he's praising Chomsky for his standing up against power when he's talking about how these intellectuals shouldn't have an ideology for themselves. But those are kind of just open-ended questions that I'm

very curious about your thoughts on. Yeah, I can take that. And Anon, if you want to say something about Benda in particular, I can maybe touch on Gramsci and touch on what you just said, Henry, in this little period right here, I think, you know, Saeed's big concern when he talks about, you know, not falling into ideologies is the concern that the intellectual will be subordinated to an ideology, a group, a party, etc. And therefore, lose their ability to see and think clearly and tend toward, you know, advocating for that. that group or that ideology with all of its blind spots that that implicates. You know, if your first and foremost concern is I'm a representative of this ideology or this group or this party, you know, it's going to, at least in many cases, cut off your ability to really think critically about that ideology group, party, et cetera. Now, the idea that any intellectual could be free of ideology is clearly worth critiquing here. And I'm not even sure he's making that full-fledged of acclaim.

And with the Chomsky thing, I, you know, I would just probably say that he's pulling some aspects of Chomsky out that he wants to highlight as why, you know, Chomsky is a sort of intellectual without necessarily apologizing or defending everything that Chomsky's ever done. I mean, particularly after Saeed passed away in 2003, you know, Chomsky kind of, you know, advocating us voting for Hillary and stuff, you know, whatever. That's, it is what it is. But I think he was just using some examples from Chomsky. But I think it's that real concern about subordinating your ruthless suit of truth to any other entity or allegiance. And so for that, I think he's fair to say that. Now, moving on to the Gramsci and the Benda definitions of an intellectual that Saeed is laying down and sort of playing with and reflecting on. For Gramsci's case, he talks about this, and I'll just read from the text. He says, those who do perform the intellectual function in society, Gramsci tries to show, can be divided into two types.

first, traditional intellectuals, such as teachers, priests, administrators, who continue to do the same thing generation to generation. And second, organic intellectuals, whom Gramsci saw that as directly connected to classes or enterprises that used intellectuals to organize interests, gain more power, get more control, et cetera. Thus, Gramsci says about the organic intellectual, the capitalist entrepreneur creates alongside himself, the industrial technician, the specialist in political economy, the organizers of a new culture, of a new legal system, et cetera. So for Gramsci's definition of the intellectual that I think Saeed takes issue with is this idea that a real intellectual could be precisely what I was just saying, subordinated to a government or an

enterprise, right? There are certainly like people who are intellectual who like write for the New York Times that work in government, that work for huge corporations, but they fundamentally do the bidding of those groups and those entities and those corporations. So from Ramshy's perspective, I think Saeed would say he includes too many people in the definition of intellectual. I don't know exactly. I mean, maybe if I really read through this chapter in depth, I could come to a different conclusion, but I think that's right.

And I would love to get both of your opinions on whether or not you think I'm right and also on what he thinks of Ben does contribution. I mean, that was basically what I was getting out of it. So I'm glad that you said that because it lets me know that I'm on the right track. just before I turn it over to Adnan to advance the conversation by talking about Benda and then going into whatever you want to talk about from this part of the book, Adnan, I totally agree with you, Brett, that people shouldn't be subordinated to ideology. And I also think that Saeed was getting at this point. So I agree with you on that point as well. I mean, we shouldn't be dogmatists.

We can ascribe to an ideology without being dogmatist. I don't think that he draws that distinction at any point in this book, though, that one can have an ideology and not be dogmatic about that ideology. It was a bit for me. And again, feel free to disagree. Listeners, if you disagree with what I got out of this book, if you've read it, let me know. I'm more than happy to take the criticism on board. But for me, it was like a little bit flat in terms of ideology equal subordination to the ideology, not that ideology can be guiding principles, but that you cannot be dogmatic within that. So I think that, you know, I agree with you, Brett. That's what I was taking out of it, but it wasn't explicitly stated, which I guess is a little bit of a criticism from my point. But

again, I'm, you know, I'm not a philosopher. I'm not a, you know, intellectual like Edward Saeed. So, you know, this could have went right over my head, you know, and I'm more than happy to admit that. Adnan, I'll turn it over to you now for the Benda part of the conversation and then just feel free to go off wherever you want with this. Well, in terms of Benda, I guess he's just the opposite pole in some way from the more sociological and functional definition in modern society that Gramsci is talking about. Although it's important to point out that, you know, he notes that Gramsci mentions that fundamentally everybody is an intellectual, but only certain people perform the functions within society. of intellectuals and these are organic intellectuals because they're related to these forces and institutions that are shaping the you know shaping society right so but the exact

opposite is is the vision of Benda where for Gramsci's sense of organic intellectuals they are you know organically or somehow perhaps even in some ways not self not self-consciously but just organic kind of representing in some ways the necessary functions of the formations within which they are a part or associated with, whereas for Benda, he's highlighting almost exclusively the rare individual who stands outside of those collectivities is adherent to some rather more abstract kind of pure principles of justice that puts, them in opposition potentially and usually with what is happening in their society and it's because they are in this position that's isolated on some level from those collective institutions and social forms that they have a magisterial sort of perspective on you know the the false and mistakes and the you know misdirections of you know politicians rulers and so on that they then can

criticize right so um he's just got this and it is a very sort of conservative vision on some level you know the idea that there are these it's very ideational you know the idea that they're these just these abstract principles and that people can commit to them you know almost in a kind of secular priest class which is why he talks about them as modern clerics in a way is that you know it's very ideational and they're a special group of people um who are in that kind of oppositional position. So I think what's happening here with Saeed's project is that he recognizes basically that Gramsci is correct

when he's describing, you know, kind of analysis of what we might even say are intelligentsias, more than intellectuals. Like if we drew that distinction, you could easily see that he recognizes that there's this whole knowledge economy, there are all kinds of expertise and skills and, you know, that have to be mastered,

you know, within a modern society that has bureaucracies, has big institutions, has, you know, and uses knowledge as basically a key industry, you know, as it were. That basically, you know, Gramsci is correct about that. But what he's arguing for in some ways is that you need and must have people who are willing to critique those things. So he's kind of sympathetic on some level. It's almost like he wants a left benda, you know, kind of group. And he's trying to synthesize some of the things that he thinks are useful from one poll with the reality that socially and historically this has changed. And I think that's also a difference for Saeed is that he sees it very much as historically related. You know, the position of intellectuals, the nature of their

representations are different in different periods of time. And they perform kind of a different role, you know, what they have to oppose the norms and the conventions and so on might be different over time because society changes. And that's why towards the end of the book, he talks about what it means today is the position that you should have is today. Now, that might not be, you know, what intellectuals were called to do in like the 19th century. So that's, I think, an important point is this historic changes in the position of the oppositional intellectual. But, you know, I think you shouldn't second guess yourself on, you know, whether you're understanding of Saeed, Henry, I think because one thing you can say, and why it was such a pleasure

reading him and his work in general, is that he's very clear. He doesn't himself use a lot of jargon and I think he stood and opposed a lot of that development in post-colonial or theoretical literature he really wasn't I think he understood theory quite well but he himself did not like to write in that vein he really and that's why he talks about being a goal of amateurism like today you should not be you should resist the forces of professionalism because in fact that is obfuscation developing an inside, outside sense of expertise and authority that is not critiquable by others outside, but that you should actually communicate on behalf of a more kind of common sense reality, common language, clarity of expression so that you can effectively represent the clear

moral critiques and ethical critiques that you want to put forward politically. He really, in that he seems a lot, you know, sort of similar in some sense with like a kind of George Orwell type figure who in that famous essay about the politics of the English language, you know, talks about not using passive voice or using all these really abstract nouns and complicated words that are not accessible to a common everyday sensibility and experience. And you could see that although Saeed is, you know, cosmopolitan, New York intellectual and professor of literature is that he's very conscious of not using jargon but speaking clearly so that the public could understand. And so I think definitely you understood

the import of what he was talking about. About the ideology question, that's a huge question. I think some of that comes from his own, he's clearly a left figure. Like Said is a left critical figure. He's for liberation, freedom, anti-colonialism, obviously very attuned to the conditions of settler colonialism and his understanding of the Palestinian experience and the cause of justice there in opposing a settler colonial state that is occupying and oppressing indigenous people. So he's on the left, broadly speaking, but it's kind of this liberal humanist and his experience also of excellent. I think he, you know, has this kind of restless spirit. You should not be too at home in one comfortable set of thinking or modes of thinking that would then, as I think Brett was pointing out, prevent you from seeing reality as it is on some level.

It might be a sort of simplistic dodge on some level from him, but I think it comes deeply from this kind of experience that he has. of, you know, exile not only as a condition that you experience, but as a way of seeing the world. Don't be too at home in any standard set of conventions or pieties. You're always supposed to take this critical position. I think that is a bit of a bourgeois kind of position on some level to take, but I wonder what you guys think about that. I'm going to butt in for one quick second at none and then i'll let brett take over this is going to be very brief you mentioned the idea of exile this is something that comes up later in the book it was an entire essay uh but within that as you mentioned he he really puts a lot of weight on the idea of exile and not being too at home

within a certain mode of thinking uh of the society that you're within and two of the examples that he uses our Zvignav Brzynski and Henry Kissinger within this chapter, which are very fascinating examples and things that we can talk about a bit later, because I know that we'll probably have some things that we want to say about that, as well as the conversation on exile more generally. And I also want to say some things on amateurism a bit later, but I'll turn it over to Brett now. I just wanted to throw out that within this idea of exile, he literally used the examples of Zbignov-Brasinski and Henry Kissinger, which I thought. thought was very interesting.

And I'm not saying that he said it as like they're very positive figures, but he used them as exemplars of this exile within a different mode of thinking. Yeah, and I would even suggest that he did that to state their righteous claims as like intellectuals for sure, but then also to critique where they went with it, right? Like he ultimately had a critique of those two thinkers where they failed to live up to that role ultimately, whatever. So yeah, it is interesting to think about. With the one more thing on the Benda and the Gramsci differences, would it be fair to say,

Adnan, that Gramsci includes too much in his definition of intellectual, Benda is too exclusive in his, I mean, he even points out like, so Benda's definition, he says, are supposed to intellectuals are supposed to being risked being burned at the stake, ostracized, crucified, right? So it's this very like almost martyred sort of intellectual. But he also critiques his rejection and ignoring of women intellectuals, right? So there's also this, like, feminist critique of Benda as well. But do you think that's fair, Adnan? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think, I mean, that's, he is looking for something that still has some of these qualities, but is not as exclusive as Benda, who just, you know, routinely excludes, you know, certain people, but also has a very

unrealistic. I think that's another, you know, dimension of it. I mean, it's very romantic and realistic kind of portrayal of these, you know, people passionate towards truth and willing to risk everything, including their lives, you know, in, you know, kind of a dramatic sort of way versus this kind of sociological vision of Gromshi that includes, well, as he says, everybody is technically an intellectual in some way because you think and reflect on your experience. Whereas, you know, but not everybody performs these functions, but then because he's looking at these functions, when we look at mass modern society. the scale is huge of all the different people, journalists and, you know, policy wonks and bureaucrats and, you know, professors and, you know, it's just a market, you know, market research people. I mean, you know, talking about in, you know, the modern, you know, state and in modern society, you, the number of people who perform functions of the intellectuals is massive. And I think for Saeed, that just loses,

some coherence of what, you know, what is valuable potentially about the intellectual, because, of course, he's not that interested in people who are just gratifying power, you know, or working for forms of knowledge that are in support of the wealthy elite and the powerful. He does take that bend a sense of the oppositional element, but he's somewhere between these two radical extremes. that either include too many or exclude too many. Yeah, and in that sense, I actually agree with Said and I actually find his definition overall,

even if there are some points to critique of what the intellectual is and the role they should play very, very compelling, very persuasive, very convincing. And yeah, he does warn against, like, as you said, professionalization or really he talks about the specialization in academia, where the higher you go in academia, the more and more specialized you become, the more broad knowledge you sort of have to look away from to focus on the competency of your

specialty. And then the more likely you are to speak in a, in a lingua franco, right, of expertise that only makes sense jargony to other expertise, experts in your field, et cetera, that cut you off from the public. And that's one of the definitions or one of the points of definition he points to is the fact that you have to play a public role, right? Like to be an intellectual means engaging in the public sphere. And so I don't think that under Saeed's definition, you could be like a recluse who just reads a bunch of books, knows a bunch of stuff, and doesn't engage publicly, right? Like that almost is like an incoherent thing under Saeed's definition of an intellectual. But he also does say that the personal aspect, right, of an intellectual is what shapes and molds them.

It's what gives them a certain voice, gives them a certain authenticity, allows them to present themselves in a certain way that people find compelling. So it's this really like this back and forth between engaging in the public sphere, but also this really radical individuality, this refusal to, you know, to sacrifice your individual intellect for the benefit of any group organization or even the comfort of your audience. And he also talks about being hijacked by your audience, right? Like you could come out of the gates being very critical of things.

All of a sudden, and this is true in the podcasting and left media. world as well, you cultivate an audience that then holds you hostage. Like they, they expect a certain line, a certain position on a certain thing. And you find yourself slowly and imperceptively maybe towing, towing that line over time. And that is also sort of abortion of the intellect in a certain sense. So those are all important aspects. Yeah. And I thought, I mean, you're bringing it to the contemporary. And I thought a lot about that, that there were so many resonances here in his analysis of it and this is before the great you know there is mass media of course i mean that's what we're talking about in terms of modernity but some of the ways in which the internet um has he's still

working in the era where you know the new york times is kind of the big thing and new york review of books you know might be where you would want to be you know kind of published as an intellectual and you know these legacy media institutions are still very important more important for him than TV, although he recognizes that when you're talking about the Gulf War and the rise of CNN, you know, that the drumbeat and march to war was guided also by, you know, this new mass, you know, form of visual news and so on. But this is all, you know, a lot of the, all these remarks that he's making actually seem to have a lot of, you know, explanatory power, you know, in terms of the pitfalls and temptations, you know, and the positioning vis-a-vis audience and so on

of relevance to our kind of media landscape, which is really very different in some ways from the time period that he was working in. And that's kind of interesting to think a little bit about what aspects of his analysis here apply when, on some level, we're more in the period where everyone can imagine themselves as an intellectual in the sort of style that Edward Said is understanding, where everybody can be, you know, putting their views out on Twitter or on Facebook and so on and so on. And there's much less of a, you know, set of institutions, you know, where the public sphere exists. Like, in fact, where is the public sphere? there's many spheres that are possible here, they're segmented and so on, and that has some

kind of a dynamic. It would be interesting to think a little bit more. As I'm speaking, I'm realizing there's a lot of possible, you know, I just mentioned about how prescient on some level are relevant what he's saying, and yet I think there are also some things that really are so different that he couldn't have conceived of at the time. I think the opportunity, yeah, I think the opportunity to be an intellectual has certainly been democratized in a sense as this technology comes down to regular people. But I think there is like this definitional aspect of his understanding of the intellectual, which ties it to a real pursuit of truth and a real siding with the most marginalized and most voiceless. And in that sense,

you know, some right-winger, right, that is critiquing society and critiquing American society and all of these things, but is doing it from a reactionary, often conspiracy-oriented. perspective that is actually not really interested in truth at all, I think that would cut them off from possibly being an intellectual in the Saeedian sense, if you will. So while there's a lot more people talking and more opportunities to be public and intellectual, there is this necessity of like the sincere pursuit of truth that is definitionally a part of the intellectual that most people, even in this new world of YouTube and podcasts and shit, still fail to utterly live up to. I agree with everything that's been said. And I just want to play off of one thing that Adnan said,

which is that he wasn't big into TV appearances. In fact, in this book and the lecture series, he explicitly states that I have turned down many roles to be, many opportunities to be a paid contributor to different, you know, big-time television networks and for a few reasons, one of which is because it really locks you in being on that one platform, which is limiting in its own way. You know, you have to kind of conform to the standards of that platform and you have to tailor your message to the audience of that platform. But also because, you know, taking money from that platform is going to also influence your message by influencing you directly, not you trying to tailor yourself to the audience, but you being tailored by them to

try to keep that gig going. And so he turned down those roles repeatedly. And he said it as much and in as many words in this work, which I thought was quite interesting. And something that I think is nice about this new media ecosystem that we have, where we have, you know, people like us. We don't have a huge audience, but we don't get paid by anyone other than people that listen to us. three different hosts with, you know, slightly different ideologies, but roughly the same, you know, in the same ballpark anyway. We have listeners that listen to us because of, because they like what we're saying. So is it true that what Adnan said that over time we're going to try to tailor our message to the audience that we've cultivated in the past? Is that going to happen? Possibly.

But this is something that because we know that this is something that might happen, we can consciously try to break out of that rut of trying to tailor things to the audience. So audience, you know, sorry if we disappoint you in the future because we bring on somebody you don't like, but bringing on people that you don't necessarily agree with on everything is what helps you test your ideological foundations yourself. If you're never challenged with what you hear, if you're never challenged with what you're presented, you're not really having much room for ideological either growth or maturation. You know, you don't have the ability to test your beliefs with a,

counter narrative. And so keeping this in mind is something that's really important. And we have a few disparate threads out there that we could turn to. But Brett, before I try to transition us to one of these threads, I'll let you go ahead. But I really do like the ecosystem that we have now with this kind of democratization of media that you were both alluding to. Yeah, but yeah, just to touch on the pressures of an audience, it's incredibly subtle. Like a lot of the times it's not so explicit as like where you burst into consciousness where you think like if I do this thing that could you know and I you know that's something I kind of had to learn too I'm kind of sensitive and like when I put something out there like I feel like I'm vulnerable and like you know through the many years of

doing Rev Left and various other shows and being public and speaking extemporaneously you're never going to make everybody happy and you know so even that pressure of like not wanting to like be attacked or not wanting to make somebody else feel as if they're attacked right like conflict diverse personalities in general perhaps like there's all all these subtle ways that these things can have an influence and can operate on you. But you're right. I think it's super important for intellectuals in general to engage with stuff that you disagree with. I torture myself with the stuff I listen to on a day-to-day basis to just make sure that I do not get into an echo chamber,

to make sure that I do not fall into dogmatism. I listen to liberals. I listen to like three-hour Joe Rogan podcast where he has on a full-on. reactionary or Jordan Peterson lectures, right? Like stuff that makes my skin crawl even. I listen to it and I really intellectually engage with it. Why is he wrong there? What would my response to this be just to exercise that muscle and to continue to be able to think critically and not fall into dogmatism? And that's one of the big worries specifically with social media and a lot of these young people coming up who are interested in the left, they not only get into like a left echo chamber and you can easily fall

into a hypersectarian micro echo chamber of like only MLM principally mal anything else outside of that is seen with extreme suspicion and actually disdain. It's like it's not that you think differently. It's that you're a bad faith cynical actor who must be attacked and destroyed and exposed for who you are. That is never going to, first of all, win anybody over. It's never going to expand your circle of people who are convinced by your ideas. But it's also the death of the intellect, you know, just knowing a lot of things does not make one an intellectual. It's being able to think critically and to constantly, a lifelong process, constantly be critical in analyzing your own ideas, your own motivations, you know, your own intentions. Why am I doing this? Why does

this make me feel weird? Why am I so hesitant to not cut out this part of the conversation where this guest says something that I know my audience isn't going to like, right? Like these things come up in very, very subtle ways. And one of the ways you can protect yourself against it is to constantly be engaging with stuff that disagrees explicitly with everything you believe in and thinking through those tensions. Because a lot of times it can poke and prod at weak spots and your understanding of your own position. And by engaging with somebody who explicitly disagrees, you can actually come to your own position stronger. I understand what this critique is. And I understand now what my response is to it. Whereas if I never even engaged with that critique

or immediately rejected it as, you know, anathema to everything I believe, I would never even have the critical capacity to sharpen my intellect against that grindstone of critique. So that's just a really important point for everybody. Don't fall into dogmatism. Don't fall into echo chambers. One of the things I see with leftists is when they get totally absorbed in these echo chambers, they lose touch with reality. They don't actually know how to like talk to a normal person, like a normal, you know, liberal, conservative guy on your street or your coworker or whatever. That capacity gets weakened. And that's a tragic. for the left. So yeah, it's worth thinking about for sure. Yeah, and I think that that's more or less

what I was trying to hammer at is that. And this is something that I think that's, you know, Saeed is also trying to get up, but in his own different way within that section is that we do have to challenge ourselves. We can't get into these echo chambers. And being a part of the media, you know, broadly conceived media, that is going to be always a risk. And, you know, unconsciously, it is going to impact us. But, you know, I think that that's incumbent on us to keep that in mind. But it's also incumbent on the listeners that, you know, if you're looking at your guerrilla history podcast feed like next year

and all of a sudden you see a guest who you've had disagreements with previously, don't just skip that episode because this person disagrees with me on whatever. It's important to take those disagreements and to actually chew on them, think about them, understand why you believe what you believe, see if you can understand why your argument is superior to an argument that you disagree with or see if there's something that in that other person's argument that can be taken up into your ideological positioning. Again, don't be dogmatic.

You know, I've used this example many times before. I've had an argument with a public intellectual who I really, really respect. And I find much of her work excellent, but I disagreed with her entirely on the U.S. withdrawal in Afghanistan, you know, on grounds of my perceived femo imperialism within her idea of what should be happening. Total disagreement between the two of us, complete. And we hash that out over, you know, a couple hours. And the result of that was that I, you know, still felt quite firm and comfortable with my position of opposing American imperialism. unfortunately, you know, the critique was not welcomed on the other end of things.

But the point is, is that I still find that most of her work is very, very valuable. And I really respect her as a public intellectual. So just because you have a disagreement with somebody on a certain point, don't trash that person. Don't trash everything that they say because they have a lot of valuable contributions, even if they disagree with you on certain points or even if they're from a different ideological tendency from you. Brett? Yeah, and just really quick off that.

point. I'm sorry, Adnan. One thing you can do in your own self is to examine the ego reaction to being criticized. When you are criticized, you'll feel a tenseness in your body. You'll feel like a feeling of like grotesquery or disgust in the pit of your stomach, a little anxiety. Like your skin gets a little flushed and hot, right? Like, and then if you don't notice that, you'll kind of jump into defensive mode. We see it a million times online, offline. Somebody's critiqued. It's a good faith critique or maybe it's not, but it's a hard. hitting critique. And that person, instead of being able to stand back, disengage their ego, think critically and respond, jump into a defensiveness, which is often motivated by this

explosion of sensations in the body that is literally just the ego going into defensive mode. To critique my position is to critique my very sense of self. And then you're off to the races of nonproductive defensiveness. So if you can actually cultivate an awareness, which I've had to do as being a public person where I am critiqued often from many different angles and then to feel that feeling of like, oh, this feels really gross to be critiqued. I don't like it, right? But to sit with it and be comfortable with it, that really helps because it allows you to disengage that ego mania that wants to take over immediately. And if you don't have that little space of awareness, oops, here it comes. I can stop it a little bit. You can often be taken over for it. So it's a small

thing, but I think it's helped me a lot dealing with often very brutal criticism right and wrong from a million different perspectives. And none, unless you have something pressing that you want to bring up on this topic, if you do, jump right in. Otherwise, we're getting a bit far away from the book itself right now. So I think that maybe we should table the rest of that discussion for later, unless you have something that you really want to bring up right now.

No, I had a new topic that I wanted to raise. Okay, great. Go ahead. I was going to ask you guys whether you wanted to turn to the section holding nations and traditions at bay, which I thought was really interesting. the exile question or the amateurism question. But if you want to go to nationality, nations and traditions, go for it if not, take it away. Yeah, I mean, that's another, something Brett had mentioned when he first talked a little bit about the introduction and the first essay,

he touched upon this kind of point here that there's, of course, some kind of attention as a, you know, representation of a larger collectivity whose cause you inhabit you know is it incompatible with an intellectual to be a nationalist to be associated with a particular grouping and their historical struggle you know how is that work there's obviously some kind of potential contradictory tensions involved in there of being loyal to this larger collectivity but then also individually maintaining that space of critique and upholding universalist kinds of values and commitments. And so Brett mentioned that it's important to forge these connections between the historical specificity of the particular problem or cause that you're part of and representing,

and to make these affiliations with the universal and analogies to other conditions. And I think one of the people who I think Edward Saeed, you know, maybe most admired as an influential intellectual, who was an anti-colonial thinker, who combined intellectual critique and analysis with actual active commitment to a struggle was Franz Fennon. And so he, I think, is something of a paragon in some ways for what Saeed is talking about. And there were two things that were kind of interesting or important. about how what he notices about Fennon uses Franz Fennon to talk about the larger condition of intellectuals and that one, of course, is that, well, he's, you know, from a third world perspective and those have been excluded typically from like the Benda and, you know, usually when we've been talking about intellectuals, we're talking about European intellectuals and we don't have a sense of how does this look from non-Western perspectives. But the point here, was that Phenon, for example, thinks that it's not just critique. You know, you don't just have this outsider position and critique, you know, what's happening, but you also have to think a little bit about what you're for.

So when he's talking about, you know, this kind of defensive nationalism of the Algerians against the colonial occupiers of France, is that you can't just think, of replacing, right? You know, the group that you're fighting against with your own sorts of structures, you have to be thinking what comes next after that and how would you organize your struggle in such a way to achieve universalist goals, you know, that don't just recapitulate the colonial condition in a post-colonial guise, which is something that, of course, was, and we see historically is a huge problem of history and then the other point was is that how do you affiliate you know that to a more universalist perspective so that you can avoid being the victimizers when you're in the

position of having achieved your historic struggle of liberation how do you avoid then turning yourself into an oppressor and I think this is really poignant because that's such a problem in history and I think as a Palestinian, he is somebody who really acknowledged and understood the horrors of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, but, you know, had to try and hold up the mirror to Israeli, you know, policies and its, you know, military occupation and dispossession of Palestine. So he was quite sensitive to the way in which, you know, you, if you you if you're not kind of if your nationalism that you're adhering to is a narrow sense of identity rather than a commitment to equal justice and broader sense of solidarity with those who suffer

and are oppressed you could easily go from the position of suffering you know a particular oppression achieving victory over that defeating that but then succumbing in some really important way those same structures because your group identity is now overwhelmed your sense and perception of the asymmetries of power. So I thought that was, and he really points out that Phenon talks about something Césaire also had brought up with, brought up, which is that you're not just trying to reverse the colonial condition in your struggle for liberation from colonialism. What you're trying to do is call forth a new humanism. You know, you're trying to create new people who actually can, you know, inhabit, you know, these, and put into effect these

universalist values of equality and justice. It's not just the replacement of one group with another. And I think that's another very poignant elements. As an intellectuals shouldn't just be about critique, but should actually be committed to something, you know, beyond just that, because there is that tension. He's saying that they're oppositional, but is it only opposition, you know, for the sake of being contrarian or pointing out the pitfalls or insufficiencies of the world as it exists? Or is it somehow a productive and progressive commitment to seeing a world, you know, that would actually fulfill those universalist ideals? That's what he's kind of talking about. I think that's kind of an important thing for us to remember as well about Saeed's thought here. Yeah. Okay. Thanks, Adnan. That was a really fascinating discussion. And I really found that this section on traditions and nationality was quite interesting. I know that we've been going for quite a while already and we've only hit like roughly half of the book. So I'm going to try to move us on to one of the other topics that's in the book right now because I think that we'll do maybe 15 more minutes of discussion focused pretty heavily on the book. And then maybe we'll have a little bit. of a Patreon exclusive, like less directly connected to the book discussion, but using the lessons of this book at the end. So I want to turn back to something that you mentioned earlier at none, which is the importance of amateurism. And I find, I found this to be a very interesting

section of the book. Because people, you know, of course, people need to make a living. People need money. And when you're an intellectual, a lot of times, and this is something that he criticizes, you're really hemmed into having a very specialized focus of study. And when you're specialized so narrowly within your scope of study, you basically have to become a professional intellectual within that specific realm of study. And in most cases, when somebody does that, they don't really reach outside of their specialty to speak on other matters. And this is where he really holds up, Noam Chomsky, as I mentioned earlier. You know, Chomsky, of course, is a world famous linguist. But among left circles, he's much more famous for his political activism and his

political speaking, his anti-imperialism than he is for his actual contribution to the field of linguistics. So that's something that he holds up in terms of being able to reach outside of your professional scope, you know, what you're explicitly paid for, what you were special. in the academy, for example, and being able to look at a different field of study entirely and take that up as a passion. And passion is really something that I think is important within this section of the book because when he's talking about what is required of our public intellectuals, I think it's important that people have the freedom to say what they truly believe

and not be held in by any sort of interest, whether that's financial or institutional or whatever. And Saeed says roughly this, within the section on amateurism, that by going into something that you're passionate about, you're a little bit more divorced from other conflicting interests on you. Now, of course, the explanation that he gives us

much more eloquent and much longer than that, but that's what I was really drawing out of there, is that we need to put less of an emphasis on the professional intellectual, right, the people that are in the academy. Sorry, Edna. I know that you're a professional historian and then I'll make fun of you for that

in this part right here. But, you know, you're reaching outside of your specialization of medieval history, medieval Mediterranean history and talking about things like, you know, decolonial studies in 1970s, Africa, or, you know, the liberation struggle in Vietnam. So, you know, even in that case,

you're reaching outside of your strict specialization. So I can't make that much fun of you here. But this is something that Saeed finds to be very important. And I think something that's worth at least talking about a little bit here. So do either of you have anything that you want to say on this role of amateurism and the importance of it, right? Sure. Yeah. For Adnan's sake, you know, and I don't know, Henry agrees with this. Adnan has a specialization, has this expertise, right? Which Saeed is warning about. but he completely and consistently applies his expertise to a much broader conversation, a much broader struggle.

And in that sense, I think fits very well in Saeed's definition of an intellectual. And there is this sort of anti-professionalism, this sense of being tied to the margins of society, right? The real intellectual shouldn't be, in my opinion, and based on my reading of Saeed, an overly comfortable person. And I think he gets into that when he talks about, you know, and the amateur niche and just the consequences of being truly outspoken on in particular, like being outspoken for Palestinian freedom in his day and even today is almost guaranteed career killer, right? And you can you can see that all over and even the people that complain about cancel culture

and stuff never seem to ever get around to talking about the people who speak out about Palestine and their very real cancellation for decades. People have lost careers over this stuff, et cetera. but to have the bravery and the courage to put that truth above your own careerism, your own attempt to cozy up to power, your own comfort, I think is really central here. And that's the amateurism. So what he says is, Said says this from the text, what I call amateur, despite their pervasiveness, each of them can be countered by what I call amateurism.

The desire to be moved, not my profit or reward, but by love for an unquenchable interest in the larger picture, in making connections across lines and barriers, and refusing to be tied down to a specialty, in caring for ideas and values despite the restrictions of a profession. So he's not saying it's not one or the other. Like, you can, you can be in a professional capacity. It just makes the, the task of being a real intellectual harder and more easy to fall afoul of, right? But you can still do it. And clearly, there's countless examples of just that. But I also like this idea. because a lot of us aren't in academia.

I'm a grad school failure. You know, I failed out after one semester of grad school. I was just never the personality type that would thrive in academia for various reasons as well as like having kids at a young age and not being able to afford grad school, et cetera. So in a society that really puts a lot of emphasis on specialization is almost like if you're,

you'll only be taken seriously if you're credentialed and really if you're credentialed, especially in mainstream media by very specific Ivy League universities, right? And so what he's doing here is there's a role for somebody completely outside of academia to be an intellectual. And I think with the democratization of technology and allowing more people to have a voice, all the pitfalls that comes with it. It also allows people who in any other era would never have the network or the personality type or the ability to make it up into the high levels of academia and get those credentials,

but still have something very meaningful to say. And in fact, some of the freaking out on the on the, on the right in America today about cancel culture and wokeness, etc. Is really at base a reaction to them having to hear and deal with and engage with opinions that otherwise had been completely shut out by white supremacist patriarchal structures of who's credentialed, who's not, who has the right and privilege to speak and who doesn't.

And when like black people and trans people and marginalized people and poor people and working class people, finally for the first time really get an opportunity to cultivate an entire audience and give their perspective on American society, you can see how this boggles the conservative and even the liberal well-off mind. And so it's precisely that, that I think about the new technologies that Saeed would actually like that aspect of it, which it gives that capacity for people who otherwise would never be heard to have a voice and to be heard. And speaking of the prescience of this text, he talks about in this text, in the early 90s, the conservative,

obsession with political correctness, right, talks about how they frame it as a left wing take over of language, et cetera. And in our own time, wokeness and cancel culture is just exactly that moved three decades forward in time. And that prescience is really great, as well as his prescience about epistemic postmodern breakdown, about objectivity coming under increasing assault and how that does not mean that we should be forced into total subjectivity, right? we still have to be tethered to objective truth and reality. But he's like pointing at these big social trends that developed after him and were amplified after him.

And time and time, again, I keep coming back to that prescient's point. But I do want to talk about the outsider as well, but I'll let somebody else talk for a second on the amateur point. Well, I just think you brought up all the key points there about that. It's not, you know, that he thinks the expertise. is a bad thing obviously you should know things you know so being an amateur doesn't mean going off and arrogating authority to speak on things that you haven't thought about or you know investigated or explored but what it is is avoiding some of the constraints the disciplining

and conventionalizing constraints that are created by being attuned more to one's place in you know, that set of norms and conventions for the sake of advancement within those, right? So that's, I think, the real problem that he has with professionalization. It's true. Specialization can be narrowing and problematic, and he wants you to have a larger vision, but I think he's very attuned to the political dimensions of this, that those are what really can obstruct and occlude your actual engagement with reality and to critique and do the one thing that he thinks intellectual really has to do,

which is to speak truth to power. And you're not going to do that if you're more concerned with professional and career advancement, which requires some kind of conformity to a special narrow public of people, the others who are part of this closed body. When he, you know, who you need to be responsible to or toward as an intellectual is, your conscience and your understanding of the, you know, universalist ethics and values and principles you adhere to and your advocacy on behalf of the broader public, not a narrow cadre of specialists. So I think that's, you know, that the intellectual is sort of the pivot

point, you know, between these kind of ideals and cause of justice and the people on behalf of those ideals you want to advocate for. So what's missing with the professional is that you're concerned with yourself and with a narrow group or audience that you need to please and have the approbation of. And that's the enemy of being free to actually critique the presumptions,

the conventions, the assumed wisdom, which is, you know, you're not really an intellectual if you're not prepared and able to say, why is this happening the way we're doing it? Why are we doing it this way? You know, why do we think these things? And to pose more fundamental and foundational questions, which you don't do when you're concerned about professional advancement

because the whole point is that you do those things, so you learn how to do those things that way, not criticize why are we doing it this way and posit something different. So I think that's, you know, really important. and he's not saying that you shouldn't be, you know, very rigorous, learned. I mean, he loved that sort of stuff, and he was himself. But he wasn't going to only be limited by his position as a professor that he can only talk about literature. In fact, actually, what's great about his literary work is that he used it to actually talk about a lot of other issues

that sometimes conventional literary scholars thought were too political or went beyond the bounds of just looking at, the internal operation of a text, you know, he was interested in how things relate to the world. And also in talking about real life, and, you know, it's not that he felt that he was the only authority or that he had everything that he could say about things that he wasn't, you know, an acknowledged expert on. It's that he would work to come, as an outsider, go into an area and try and understand, well, what is the basis for this, you know, from this, external perspective, if I go in and immerse it, you know, what is the, you know, basic fundamental issues here? And what's my stance on that? And he would use that as a productive way

to actually stimulate, provoke, and make that, you know, field of knowledge, you know, more enriched and actually have to respond to create that dialectic. So I think that's, you know, what he meant, I think, by amateur is not some casual sort of sense that you could, just talk about things that you hadn't really studied or thought about, but it's an approach to that knowledge and the purpose of that knowledge. Yeah, and I really appreciate the way that you and Brett both articulated that point. I'm definitely not at my most articulate today. I was just diagnosed with COVID yesterday.

So I'm kind of relying on you two to pull together my incoherent ramblings into something that actually is useful for the audience. Although I know many of the listeners would say that that's just like any other guerrilla history episode anyway. But, you know, I do appreciate it. And that was a very excellent explanation from the two of you. Thank you for that. Brett, I'll turn it over to you for talking about outsiders, which I think will be the last major topic that we have time for. But I do want to mention one brief thing then afterwards before we get into the Patreon exclusive part, because I'd be kind of remiss to not have it at least mentioned during the public part.

Yeah. For what Adnan just said, I think it's funny because Cornell West put a blurb on the back of this book, at least the copy that I have. And I think exactly what Anana is saying, Cornell West probably lives up to that idea of an intellectual who is in the professional academic realm, right, like for the Harvard thing, for example, right? He comes out. He speaks against, you know, the Israeli oppression of Palestinians, loses his, it doesn't get a 10-year at Harvard, even though he has all the credentials possible. And then he uses that as an opportunity to critique Harvard, et cetera. So I think Saeed would very much see a fellow spirit in Cornell West. And I'm sure their lives obviously clearly overlapped.

I'd be interested to learn more about that. But let's talk about the outsider aspect because this is connected to exile and things like that. It's in the chapter, intellectual exile, expatriates and marginals. He talks about being an exile metaphorically within your own society. And this really spoke to me. So he says, while exile is an actual condition, exile is also, for my purposes, a metaphorical condition. By that I mean that my diagnosis of the intellectual in exile derives from the social. and political history of dislocation and migration with which I began this lecture,

but is not limited to it. Even intellectuals who are lifelong members of a society can, in a matter of speaking, be divided into insiders and outsiders, those on the one hand who belong fully to the society as it is, who flourish in it without an overwhelming sense of dissonance or dissent, those who can be called yaysayers. On the other hand, the naysayers, the individuals at odds with their society, and therefore outsiders and exiles so far as. privileges, power, and honor are concerned. The pattern that sets the course for the intellectual

as outsider is best exemplified by the condition of exile, the state of never being fully adjusted, always feeling outside the chatty familiar world inhabited by natives, so to speak, tending to avoid and even dislike the trappings and accommodation of national well-being. Exile for the intellectual in this metaphysical sense is restlessness, movement, constantly being unsettled and unsettling others. You cannot go back to some earlier and perhaps, more stable condition of being at home. And alas, you can never fully arrive, be at one with your new home or situation. And that spoke deeply to me because not that I rise to the level of a Saeedian intellectual, but this sense of feeling very much an outsider in America, the only

place I've ever lived, has always been a factor of my life. I've always been inherently, intuitively sort of repulsed by this society at least, you know, age 15 and on when I be able to develop an intellect. I always saw that the absurdities of American society and growing up and coming into political consciousness during and after 9-11 and the war on terrorism showed me this snarling nationalism and this ignorance and this hatred and this lack of curiosity on behalf of the American behemoth, the culture and the empire that America is. And so, you know, feeling very much an exile in a society that I am fully of. I am a hundred percent American in my mannerisms, my values, my assumptions, et cetera.

Like, I'm raised in this culture. I've never lived outside of it. But at the same time, I've always felt alien within it and always felt, as he says, a deep existential restlessness. And, you know, it's like trying to shake other Americans awake. Like, this is not okay. This is a nightmare in so many ways, you know. And so I really liked that he did that.

It's not just this geographical dislocation where you're literally in exile, which he talks about fascinatingly in this text, but also being an exile or feeling as if you're in exile in your own society, really spoke to home. And I think speaks to a lot of us on the communist left, right? Like to be a communist in America is absolutely to bear a fucking cross and to bear a burden and to constantly be attacked and demonized by the most powerful people in society, but to still hold that line and to have that.

communist critique of America inside the belly of the beast, while it makes you a target, it also, I think, serves an important intellectual role in precisely the way that Saeed triumphs in this text. So I really liked that point. Yeah, no, that's very well said. And I just have to respond to Henry's suggestions. You know, I hope he's feeling better soon, but he has been on point the whole time, and that is generally and universally the case. So I don't know where the, you know, modesty topos came in here. I'm not sure how Saeed would think about that. I mean, I think he would think it's good not to be arrogant, but at the same time, don't, you know, don't integrate the position that you have.

So, yeah, I think, you know, one of the other things that I was thinking about in this sense is all that about exile is that it's clearly, he says very clearly that it is both a condition and a metaphor, it's like a style or approach, and you don't have to be an exile to adopt the kind of position of being an outsider and feeling that you're an outsider when you start to really be an intellectual, which means to question the truths and the conventional wisdom around you, that is going to make you an outsider and likewise being in that outsider position gives you a perspective and advantage that's very important for genuine kind of growth and being able to see things in a new and in an other sort of way and the real task is then to be able to try and communicate that to a to a public in the ways that

i think brett you had mentioned before and henry you'd also mentioned before not being captured by your desire to please that public, but using that kind of tension that's created from your own oppositional viewpoint and experience and outlook, and use that to provoke and stimulate people to undergo likewise their shake-up of conventional ideas and assumed truths. That's kind of the whole game for him, is that you're serving an important function and a role by adopting this kind of exilic, you know, sort of sense of not being at home wherever you are. Like, you know, even in your own society, there are ways to not be at home in it in the sense that you see your nation, you know, fabricating truths in order to create a

consensus and rushing to war. I mean, how can you feel at home if you are actually somebody committed to the cause of justice and peace without you know finding yourself in an oppositional you know stance and that's to be an exile in your society during those moments is that you're taking a position where you're not just going to identify in a kind of collective endeavor if it doesn't accord with moral truths and principles of justice so i think you know you're so right i mean um i found reading this very inspiring. I mean, I think we should probably at some point talk about some of its weaknesses or where we had differences, but I have to say that overall, it's a very inspiring kind of position. I mean, he does create an attractive sense of what it means to be an

intellectual that's balanced between, I think in every point he's trying to find a balance between various extremes that isn't actually a compromise. I mean, I think that's one thing that's very interesting about his approach, is he doesn't take the way in which the role of the intellectual has been framed by others. He tries to move with and beyond those without just maybe making a kind of simple compromise between the bend-down. and the Gramsci position. He chooses the elements of each that creates and maintains

kind of active oppositional tension. You get the sense that he was somebody who through his whole life was always engaged in some kind of struggle. You know, like he was not somebody who just rested in a comfortable position but always found himself identifying with oppositional

the the the the the martin you know that that title for that essay that's really you know ex-patriots and marginals you know that's who he really saw himself a part of now this is somebody who is of course a very noted university professor

at Columbia and it's interesting to see how much for him his sense of his reality however was always to be in tension with that you know he knows that it comes with privileges but he's always still trying to identify with how do we further the cause of equality and justice and be true to our principles in the public sphere it's not an easy thing to do yeah love all of that and i just want to mention uh bring up brett's point

about feeling like an exile even within the united states even though that was the only place you've ever lived you know that was roughly the same experience that i had being somebody on the communist left within the United States. Very same situation that you had. I never really felt at home, at least intellectually within the United States. And then I've been in exile since then. I lived for several years in Germany. Was an exile literally there and also felt exiled intellectually. And now I'm living in Russia. Again, literally in exile. But interestingly, I feel slightly less of an intellectual exile here. And that's not because Russia is a communist country. Obviously, anybody who's listening to guerrilla history knows that, you know, it's not the, it's not what

the average CNN listener thinks, but we all here know that Russia is not a communist country, but communist thought is still quite prevalent here. You know, what a lot of listeners, you know, unless you look at Russia, you know, political, the political scene of Russia today, many listeners probably don't know that the largest opposition party is the Communist Party of of the Russian Federation, they're the second biggest party in the entire country. And they just had a great turnout in the last election, not quite as good as some polls for indicating that it would be, but quite good. You know, there's Lenin statues, hammers and sickles, literally everywhere.

So, and even in the conversations that I've had with some people and keeping in mind that I don't yet know the language here, so the conversations I'm having with people are in English, which is, you know, restricting my subset of people that I'm able to have, conversations with, but still the intellectual conversations that I'm having with people here makes me feel like much less of an exile in many cases than I ever did in the United States, despite actually being an exile, which is interesting, but, you know, just an aside. That's really interesting. That's really interesting. And the jump from the U.S. to Germany to Russia, I mean, just the whole 20th century right there, right? Naziism, communism, capitalism,

like to be in those three different cultures and to be an intellectual in those three different cultures is really, really interesting. And with Germany, obviously you have the history of socialist revolution in Russia. You clearly have the Soviet Union and all that history and that cultural legacy. And in the U.S., what takes those places is just a rabid anti-communism. And if we want to connect to American socialist communist roots, you have to dig deep because you're not going to find it on the surface of culture like you will in Russia. Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of things that I could say about that, but that's a conversation for a different day, which I'm happy to have at any point, but not today. We're already running pretty long here. The last thing that I want to say before we cut out on this, this is the early release section. So the people on our general feed will be able to hear this part of the conversation. We're going to continue the conversation for, I don't know, an extra 20 minutes about our thoughts and criticisms for Patreon.

exclusive. So people that are on our Patreon, you'll hear that portion a week after I put this up on our Patreon, this public section. But the last thing that I just want to mention is one of the criticisms that I had. And perhaps we'll just have like a brief second to just briefly mention our thoughts about it in case you disagree with me in any way before we hash it out a little bit more thoroughly in the Patreon exclusive section, which would be Edward Saeed's opposition to communism. I find it, you know, it's an unsurprising, somebody who's, looked into Saeed previously and read some of his things, he's not a communist. It's very obvious that he's not a communist. He says as much that he's not a communist. So to see

denigrations of the Soviet Union, for example, unsurprising. But what was something that I would criticize him for is how he did it. And what I mean by that is he, at several points in the book, particularly later on in the book, would say things like, you know, we can't we can't always feel like the need to feel like we're balanced, right? I think that he talked about this in his same section that he was talking about, not TV media appearances because of taking money and things like that. He was saying things like Pete, that the onus is always on the intellectual, to seem balanced, to seem fair, to seem like an unbiased person,

whereas what they really should be doing is fighting for their convictions, fighting for their passions, right? And that is a point that we all agree with. You know, people shouldn't have this knee-jerk reaction to try to seek some sort of balance. This is a problem that we have. This is why we make fun of CNN. Let's be real. This is why we make fun of CNN other than the fact that it's, you know, a capitalist mouthpiece

owned by multi-billion dollar corporations with multi-billion dollar corporations as advertisers. The other problem with CNN is that they have. try to seek balance, even when there is no balance necessary, like, oh, here's somebody who says that we shouldn't have racism in society. So now we have to bring on somebody who's like a rabid Islamophob to be balanced in terms of our coverage of this issue, which is, I mean, stupid. Let's just say it as it is. It's absolutely incredibly, unbelievably, intellectually insulting to the audience that they have to be presented both sides of the argument, no matter how blatantly obvious the true situation of that topic is. So we all agree with that. But when it came

to the Soviet Union, there was several points in the book where he would mention something that the United States did negatively. He mentioned Vietnam, right? And he would talk about the horrors of Vietnam. And then immediately afterwards, almost every time that he would mention something negative that the United States did, he would immediately follow it up with. But, you know, the Soviet Union also did bad things like their invasion of Afghanistan, right? He mentioned that I think twice in the book. And I bring that up specifically because Brett, you just put out an episode yesterday about the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan on Rev Left. So listeners check that out. But the reason that I'm criticizing this point is because that narrative is easy. It is easy. He's doing this lecture

series on BBC radio for a British audience from the British government's broadcasting corporation, right? Those people, and this is in 1993, it's immediately after the fall of the Soviet Union. It is so easy to kick the Soviet Union while it's down, and it did very little to actually advance his argument in terms of the role of the intellectual in society. If you're seeking concrete examples, the concrete examples that he were providing in terms of things that were still ongoing by the United States were perfectly sufficient. There was no need to reach back and say, well, there was mass internment in prisons in the Soviet Union. And that was, you know, equally bad to something that the United States did and the intellectuals there were being hamstrung by the government.

You know, understood. You could use that as an example. But it was almost every time that something was brought up negatively about the United States. He would bring up something as a counterpoint in the Soviet Union in order to seem. And again, this is my interpretation of it. in order to seem balanced for the audience of this BBC radio lecture series, which was directly contrary to what he was saying that intellectuals should be doing. And we know that he was not a communist,

but it was unnecessary and did very little to advance the argument in my personal view. So, yeah, and I mean, that's, of course, I'm going to be very biased on the subject. You know, I'm a Soviet Union apologist on many fronts, although, you know, I'm a Marxist, Leninist, anti-revisionist, but non-dogmatist. So I have criticisms about the Soviet Union myself, and I'm more than happy to talk about those criticisms, but the way that he presented them in the book, it seemed like he was trying to seek balance to that when the listeners to this BBC radio lecture would hear it about something that the U.S. was doing negatively in the name of nationalism or tradition

or whatever, all of these different things that we've been talking about, about how intellectuals function in society, he had to say something that then the Western BBC audience would kind of lap up in order to get his message to sink in. But I'm happy to be criticized on that. So feel free to say anything. Otherwise, we'll wrap up this public part and go into the Patreon exclusive part. Yeah, no, I'm excited to go into the other part because I have to talk about the inherent challenge to communists in more detail and some some key takeaways. I guess the charitable thing on that front would be to to point to his critique of the Manichaeanism, like this divide during the Cold War where you're either on one side or the other. So charitably, you could say

that he was trying to balance that out. But I do agree with your take. And I think the hypocrisy is really pointed at with regards to like Arabs and Muslims. Like it's also very easy in the West to shit on Arabs, shit on Muslims, to indulge in the weakest Islamophobic tropes. And I don't think he would be as as you know happy with both siding those issues as he as he seems to be with particularly this one there's a lot to be said though I don't want to talk too much on that particular from but I do have a lot to say in the in the other Patreon part so people are our patrons definitely go listen to that because I have a few core points I still have to make great so on that front then we'll do the our brief outro you know say how people can find us right here for the the public part of

this and then we'll go into the Patreon exclusive part. So listeners, if you're listening to this and you aren't yet on our Patreon and want to hear the continuation, which will be relatively brief, but the continuation of this discussion, you can support us by going to patreon.com forward slash gorilla history. That's forward slash G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A history. You can find that Patreon exclusive post there. And yeah, let us know what you think about it, because I'm sure that we're going to have some very interesting things to say. Adnan, how can the listeners follow you and find your other podcast? Well, you can follow me on Twitter at Adnan A. Hussein, H-U-S-A-I-N. And you can check out the M-A-L-L-S. It's on all the platforms. And episode 13 is about

the life of Edward Saeed, a new biography. that I discuss with a co-host. So check it out. Absolutely. It was an excellent episode, by the way. Like I said, I took a lot out of it. I remember vividly listening to that episode while I was walking around in the former East Germany.

Brett, how can the listeners find you and all of the excellent work that you're putting out consistently from your two podcasts? Thank you. You can go to Revolutionary LeftRadio.com to find everything I do. And also check out Goods for the People. They made merch with Rev Left and they've got their business up and running again after a really tough COVID era.

So if you want a special design Rev Left merch, check out goods for the people. I think it's in their 2020 or 2021 collection. But yeah, they're good comrades and I'm really happy with that design. I never promoted enough. So check it out. Yeah, we might have to do some guerrilla history stuff there as well. I know that we've had some people ask about the shirt that Adnan was wearing during our live stream event with Gerald Horn. so that's something that perhaps we can work on with them as well.

Listeners, for me, you can find me on Twitter at Huck-1995, H-U-C-K-1-9-95, and you can follow the podcast on Twitter at Gorilla-U-R-R-I-L-A-U-R-L-A-U-Score pod. Like I said, we're now going to go into the Patreon exclusive section. So for those of you who are only listening on the general feed, until next time, Solidarity. You know what I'm going to do. Thank you.