REFLECTIONS ON EXILE and Other Essays EDWARD W. SAID37 ‘Traveling Theory Reconsidered oth tei original power and rebi sand situations, iit they lose some af ness. The example Fused was Georg, which is fully explained in the famous sterpiece, History and Clasr Consciousnes ii2on enough bias thas, even though sn the essay, ¢ a human expeti fa theoretical formulation, its Force Lukics's theory of r fourth chapter of Underlying my an: Tried to guard ag ‘This bias ean b ence is recorde -eate its otiginal power; because the situation has quiesed dawn and changed, the theory is degiaded and subdued, made inta a relatively tame academic substitute for the 1eal thing, whose purpose in the ‘work I analyzed was political ch hice was work he cal separ ‘Traveling Theory Racontiderea tation of abject and subject, the aromizacion of human life under aint of tbe proletariat, ich object thar was enabled by get- brutally capitalise seciery and Lukes presses Marsisms that is ly the res aleera ness, Tobe conscious of how widespread is reific is way can subjectivity wncletstand ats ob umn makes passible an understanding of what kepe subject and abject apast, and how chey can be rejoined. ‘The point I made about al icked up bbylare European seadents and readers of Lukas (Lucien Goldmann in Paris, Raymond Wii Cambridge), the ideas of this theory had wurtectionary fore, had been tamed and domesticated 1 application nn theories trav- {jective situation, and chis hat whei ey were and gist. What seemed almost led and were used elsewhere the author! c ont doxy. Te nary Budapest, Lukics's theary of the subjectabject split and of rei ducement to insurrestionary action, with the hope that a proletarian perspective in his highly eccentric view of it would see “reality” as ¢m-What now seems t such an ac: coune of Lukées's theor travels ig that I stressed. the recencilistory and resolvable aspects of his diagnosis. Those wl borrowed from Lukies—and for that macter Luk selfs iy between opposed factors was ro transeendence, ar Aufhebang. Lu fection oF all 0 sional pursui bee which ¢ rejoined phase of th Lewy We powerful con the young Lukes, the romantic anticapitalisc, af Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard, whose ex. plorations of medern angst found so devastatingly thorough and an vation not only in Hintery and Clans Consciousnets but also treatises, Sond and Form and Theory of the Novel. Bur, it ean be argued, so too can the Kietkegaardian and Dostocvskian influences nist resolution, or even redlemp- ctobyece nee nesal, projected, ot "pucacive” category of “totality, leap from present misery to future healing recapitulates {i cally encury irrationalist’ leaps of fa But what if some of Lukics’s readers, eotally influenced by his de scription of reification and the aubject-objecr'impasse, dd not accepe lent of his theory, and indeed deliberat does nor ac- progra refused it? Would this not be an ory, one thar actually developed awry from its ot ‘Dut instead of becensisig domesticated, in the terms c's desine for respite a ames ont, x0 t9 speak, cestates and reaffirms its ot “Traveling Theory Reconvidared onverfiel as reteospectively to undermine Lukaes’s recor Free she hr lee te putes etond eto ws ale the standpoint of the proletariat"? Mighe we then not call this surprising development an instance of “transgressive theory,” in the sense thar it crosses aver fi ges the notion of a eheory thar be and ends up promising 2 form of latory ges gins with fierce contradie redemption? kaes. In che ps es (1923) he area response. The most works is Theory ofthe Nove (1920), premised on the no odies che wajeeta resentative status as sh ous consticutive ironi is based on its eremen. ‘errant souls [adventuring] in an inessential, empey te pase gods and gods to come" but never of what és present, or "the inony [which] has t0 seek the anly world thar is adequase to it along the eva dolores OF inte doomed never to find it thete,"? Before he becomes a Marsist, therefore, Lukées’s overpowering ‘sense of the disjunetions of modernity (which in bis Lagos essay of 19:7 he abstracted into “the subject-nbject relationship"? led him to regard ric asa site where their contradictions are manageable, and ww he is,indebeed to both Kant a largely original, Ba nation of a particular or that of speal the aeatl fection af he says, is itself in a sense the in phase in the subject-object eta ‘The essay, for example, about heralding a rese never giving iegthe tragedy is he faal clach between subjects, and 0 for the novel has a special priv ilege 1. and dalthaugh Lukacs never actually says this) by the face chat theoretical discourse nplenity tepeeset the by ies sheer (Gul as his} can expressac eccursatter Theory ofthe Ne is thac Marxism, as barne and reflected in “the class consciousness of ly revealed 0 be the theoretical discourse te soki Neverd . resolution is almose by append yet, There i a ¢ said immediately, supplies h iC authority andl assertive certainty im his accents chat, it mu acer work wi s boch of the nev tariat’s class conciousness), for Adorno that particular choice was, he said ina f cs essay, a kind of false reconciliation und 3 Much more typical, more in keeping. character of madernity was vas Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern, nor Stravinsky and 5 Philosophie dev neuen Musik (rg48) is 4 quite spectacular ‘ory gone tougher, hard stance of a more recaleiteasst, In the first i essay of History ana Class Conicous unattractive density and philo- to it, Lukics's choice of the history of classical phi- here cao the narrative of stration af subjs to show hot \reasing desperation and {tension unrelieved by ply alienation had pene- anabzed as a pure symptom of the ove Adorno goes. step Furcher. Madern rarefied, 20 special ciety and any of ics palliacves. Th figure 10 Adosno, who stands fa like Beethoven ‘or like Wagner lability between the wmercial, The ewe! accthetic and che com 18 an art of so total srbative a mode as to reject listences altogether: ng to Schoenberg as described by Adon seasterted 1 art had become filse interpretations and stereotyped audience reaction patterns.” These, Adorno said sternly, eded 10 “be desctoyed." Any illusions thar the conaligy rejected enberg was somehow natural are rejected: according to Ador tonality corresponds to "the closed and exclusive system [of] mercantile society," music submitting to the demands of trade, consumerism, ad- istration, Not for nothing ehen ina later essay did Adorno attack smal music, with its limitless repro- ned in “Toscanini as the maestro of co * ducibilicy we candluctor’s inonlske dominance and precision. cs the atomized individual consciousness in surveying its inauchencic perfection, and heartless chytlms ca: it by "class eo! because, in Lukass’s rather circumspect description, con- sciousness was not empirical or actual ymeddiately experienee- mpurablable consciousness" was a daring com- oof what was later to be called Marxist posite ade up noe im, but in Kant’s aesthetic a good deal of op: connection of the subject with itsel alone snusic can accertitselFagainst cialis, has hardened mu: which caused absolute sn Advanced so become whar it is, . ic has no recourse but 69 insist upon its-own os sification without concessis Music sciousness has give Adorno, from its ” Nov chat th be enjoyed as, say, an 1850s aese i Vieory Krsna rad work derives from such appalling, “social ots" as chis, chete is canse- quently a recoil from th chae “despises [the] sion of reconciliation" sands new music Precisely because its constitutive principle is the disjunctive twelve. note series, its harmony 2 mass of dissonances, its inspiration the re- morseless “control” of the composer who is bound by the systems inbreakable laws, music aspires to the condition of theoretical know! edge. Of what? The contradiction. So between char awareness and an attitude irony) from the early expressionist works te cerpieces. Asif affectianac J describes jomination of tonal materi severity, objectivity, and regulaco! ieself with an al js up by dominating hi power of a rechnique that supplies ive harmony; inflection, canal color, chychm—in short a new'logic for music, the object of the s “become “a second blind nature, guishes the subject” (68-69). In Ador ly regressive sequenee, a sort of endgame procedure by which be threads his way back along the routs taken by Lukes; all the laboriously constructed solutions devised by Lukics for pulling him ies given by art, philosop! led and rendered u: untenableight of juss the consummately Fane sory fearures accentuates hosery, character ofits existence, capable, (7) emvanati Sevens Zei ghim the aura ofa Bgure rep now chastened and pethaps redeemed fier postwar clegiac reflection re roo. Recal But Lukses's theory has voyaged els Lukacs and Adarno there is first of ire particularly che affinity stemming from the Hegelian cradi hey both belong. Ic is g to dis -ct-obj ed with devastating intellectual and political force in Frantz Fanon’s last work, The Whetched of the Barth oti ys the very year of its authox's death, All of Fanon’s books on colo: showevidence af his indebtedness: to Marx and Engels, as well as to Proud and Hegel. Yer the striking iates his last work from, say, ar benween a common Buropern eulture che Alger wy of che settler versus the 1 the tension chavis scare is previous Theory Revanal dara clog nique ot ly eloquent 3 seem to have happened berween [Am Ve le sevolution a sivienne (1959), his First collection of escays after he changed his focus fiom the Caribbean to North Africa. and The Wretched of the Earth, One mn had widened the gulf between France and its colony. There ater drive toward separ astute observation, and anal vignette give Fanon's w ‘of ehers, obviovsly is thar che progress of the Algerian revo deepened cioms, a rigorous the most extensive idence [ have is, co repe: Some of dl peated in Angumiontra few pears esti, by tire book had made its appearance anywheee at all, ever had recanted the book’s most radical tenets a generation earlier, In his preface Axclos compared Lukics w Brecht's Galilee, associating him also with those other mattyrs co truth, Socrates, Christ, and Giordane Bruno; aecordling to aAxelos, the main point for avrencieth-century thought, however, was that Lukécs’s great treatise was expunged from both history ancl class edinscioustiess, with ag visible effeccs on those working people the book was devigned t0 assist, , How stromply the subjectobjeet dialectic resonated outils Europe, and for an audience made up af colonial subjects, is immediately ap the opening pages of The Wresched of anism Fanon describes as separating che clean, vile, disease-rid nd then to animate che ied (subject and alstimulate set Lukes pu Conscivn As in his supremely Hegelian 1922 Prefiee to History and Clus 06 “Te is of the essence of dialect which are false in their abserace onesidedissarelater anscended this Fanon nothing absteact or conceptual h, as Conrad once said, “mostly means the sad] away from those 16 silence ce—in a word, t0 pul Lukice's dialects is grou led in The Wretched of the Ear siven a kind of harsh presenee nowhere éo be found in thinking, of the elacsical ism—instivated by Europeans who like Odyseeus came to the peripheries to ¢xploic the land and its people, and there afer co constitute a new aggressive selfhood—and disappears the setder “has no longer any (45). The subjective colonizet has turned th: humanized ereature for whom zoological the sottler exit st apr; for Ther repressive presence are bor nentioned “produces i Jockjaw” (3) jalectic most rate about its limitations, Thus, co re ‘enclave and che native hese “two zones are apposed,” says Fanon, "but nat in the service of a higher unity. ... They betl follow ehe principle of recip. sible, for of the two tern uses whar ig a ich “analysis between the coloni reciprocal homogeneity ¢ subjectobject lialectic ef momenes appears to play says there is no admits thar thew is na colonial setting: “good is quite simply chat 50). Botdoes Fanon, like Lukécs, suggest chat erm is vi a reconciling, teansfiguring role. True, Fa out violence and cexcai which isevil for ‘them the 2 case in point) chan co says it. In ocher words,j rheary Rezonel dered Je native is concerned ea we decides to putan end to the sgeandd to b replaced by reveh would be to, miss Fano i critique of Lukas, in which th tional element missing in. Hor snl Cl that work, like Man's 8 entive ence by Fanon. For him, subjec and object are European hon-European respectively; colonialism does not just oppase the terms 5) and the people to cach other. It obliterates and suppresses their pres- and de- re before it began bofire ic started to fight, ta consist in the viol night be seen as le Buc Fanon’s essen fon -is that nationalism is a necessary’ is is most notably evident in alism, the process of decolonizat alectic to and here he ‘one step along the been turned by racism in Fanon dist ion.” Yer even there also rejects Lukacs’s own re: lestic as Hegel envisioned it for white bar far f Europe, an be used by whites against Negroes: “here temporary lin che colonial relationship betweers races] the master differs basi ‘crms of the subject-object a y from che master described by Hegel. For Hegel there is re status as negat sipeosity; here the mascer la selves with “a royal pardan’” (85p:sisce they stand outside What he wants from che sl lass gyster abouie which Lakées Wretebed of the Earth exis sede, in a se in che coloni sulficient condision for wenatives who reject ane evil take on wotenceas a way of p at the consciousness of the slave 5 not recognition bur work." In The racial relationships have been super- hey art now located and resituaced geograph rote, colonized na ng, swim 1B be like noe tor interpreted a an an- 1g the oxher, and in the national len lead to expulsion; for ‘mean that national independence will be achieved. Yee b The apposites reflect each athe! h expulsionTiviting Theory Wezawehered and colonialism, enfolded wi cependence belong essentially @ the unforgiving dialectic of sponse to the eolousalise dialectic, from which they have never fully ib ig scrip. erated themselves, satisfied as they have been with the imications and have simply taken over from effect the new nation will European masters. Bur ev ry turn Fanon relies to produce a new set of police crats,and meschants to replace some degree on Lukics, althoug! cs thar had been the departed Europeans, And indeed afier his opening chapeer rejected or toned down by Larkics | ceven for a col lence Fanon proceeds to show how setting, as he criticized tion advocated by printed with the tne History and Clats Consciueness as the "class consciousness of the prole« " Fanon cakes Fro eteafter Fanon i628 pi ier and colonized ilacra of soversignty that in this extraon scending itself’. iris equ Against itself” (Bo), oon the other dleconsecrati hapeer on “The Pitfalls of Natio kes clear what he has been intending all to cmigrace, co remain in a sens consciousness is undoubtedly going to be caprared by Adorno and Fanon exemplify this profound zeatlessness in the way I bourgeois eli nationalistie leaders, and far from they refuse che emoluments offered by the Hegelian dialectic as stab guiarentecing re I perpetuate colonialism in a lized into resclution by Lukiies—or che Lukées who appeared to speak new form, Thus, he says, if nationalisns “is nor for class consciousness as something ta be gained, possessed, held enriched and deepened by a very rapid transformation inte a con conto, There was of course the other Lukics which both his brilliant sciousness of social and political needs, in other words, into hu. vereaders profetred, che theorist of peemanent dissonance as under. ‘manism, icleads up a blind alley" (204), Borrowing from Ainé Céssére, stood by Adar io, the critic of reactive nationalism as partially adopted Fanon suggests that the necessityisto "invent souls,” not to reproduce colonial Algeria, the solur wlas either of cotonis tribal pase. “The living expression of the nation is the moving consciousness of the whole of che people; itis the coherent, enlightened action of and women” (204). 12 geagtaphical dispersion of E mean chae when Adorne uses tory of music, or ight co cede its power Lukes to-understand Schoenberg's when Fasion dramatized the eolon bject-object di + Lukées, using him at a belated second degree, ig him from one sphere oF region into I struggle in che language af 1 noe hhas been since his death too states, Algetia included, The gise of for this insufficiently visionary re- strenio his last work paismg One would nat, cos stance to French colo: Viennese ewelveston: the disparities are too grotesque even co articulate, But in ndly and concretely felt by Adorno and figure, present boch as music co the Algeti core was reignited is fifties, Lwas whose name was "History and Litetaturs.” Although there were under jjred in one oranather of the lite graduates whan History and Liceracure and a s were in the history department, it was then believed chat only few especially sifted srucents could handle che ewo disciplines together. Metcifully, do nat recalla great deal abourwhacas a group the students and cucors and Lis."{as it was called) actually did, bue | know that I gave 8, one on Thucydides and one oxi Vieo, the idea, I chink, bbeing that both writers ensbodied an approach to history that was liter: ary and an approach eo literature that was somehow historical. Aside from thas, I recall chat the snobbish aura thac gave History and Lie. its prestige at Harvard was chac our students—who were mostly literary in theie interests—were not afraid been ine seresced in, Fteracurs from a withi and may even have actu: storical standpaint, oF lie historical content tatoem by either the Professors of History or the Professors of ‘There was something about us that to thers seemed either too weak iss