When do questions of mentalities and ideas begin — before shifts in reality, after them, or in step with them? Applied to Western cases in particular, we find Spengler, who published The Decline of the West (1913) after several years' work on it: his colleagues rejected the book, pointing to the long peace that had prevailed in Europe and to the progress that followed the wars of German unification. Yet the Spenglerian fears and forebodings, civilizational though they were in character, were soon borne out by the outbreak of the First World War. A second case worth citing here is the revolt of Europe's students in 1968, led by the young of the German and French universities.
Capitalism was in its most flourishing period, particularly in Germany, yet that did not keep Marxian youth from sensing anxiety and imbalance. The disaffected European wave then moved toward the universities of the United States, where there were real problems plain to the eye: the implementation of civil-equality laws after the Black revolt, and the ferocious American war on Vietnam to keep the communists of the North from taking Saigon.
What I want to discuss this week, after the European and American pessimism, concerns decadence rather than collapse, and it comes from the opposite direction — from Asians and Africans. One of the ironies is that most of these rebels against the West are professors at American and British universities, of Indian, Latin American, and Arab origin, counted among the successful in the very Western paradise they rebel against. The first name to come to mind, of course, is Edward Said, in his Orientalism (1977), which reproached the discipline for its dogmatisms, its biases, and its persistence in manufacturing a false image of Islam and the Arabs, one cut to fit the West's ambitions and its colonial presuppositions. Said's book was met with an enormous welcome from every quarter, and from the universities of America and Europe.
The criticisms came from two directions: from the partisans of Orientalism, such as Bernard Lewis, and from senior figures in other disciplines — philosophy, anthropology, history, sociology. Lewis denied that the Orientalists were for the most part prejudiced against the Arabs and Islam, and recalled how many texts and studies they had published and how many projects of understanding they had advanced. Those of the other tendency argued that Orientalism was a subsidiary, marginal concern, not a foundational element of the Western human sciences. Said paid no heed to Bernard Lewis's campaign; but under the pressure of the second he hastened to publish Culture and Imperialism, in which he held that all the human sciences bear a colonial cast in one form or another.
The other radical critique of Western civilization, which has grown prevalent in recent years, was led by the well-known anthropologist Talal Asad in the volume he edited in 1974 under the title Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter. Said had held that the Orientalists betrayed the traditions and values of the Enlightenment, and that had they stayed faithful to them they would not have fallen into the dogmatisms of manufacturing false images in the service of colonialism.
But the anthropologists and historians who carried the radical campaign forward between the 1970s and the close of the twentieth century — Guha, Spivak, Talal Asad — located the problem in the traditions, values, and philosophies of the Enlightenment itself, which prevailed in Western thinking while their practice stayed confined to the West in the age of colonialism and after it. In recent decades, once the mutual pretense came to an end, they have turned into hypocrisy and ruin for the entire world.
This is the logic of the intellectual, cultural, and political current known as the subaltern school. Can the subaltern speak? Of course not — because the language called scientific is a language in which, and over which, control is exercised, and not in its terminology alone but in its very vocabulary. The proof is the world of metaphor, which has preoccupied French and American writers and thinkers, and which seeks to control the imaginary as well, in the Aristotelian sense and in modern linguistic interpretation. And when these figures attack even the Western imaginary, they mean not only philosophy and history but the art of the novel, painting, the arts at large, the means of communication, and what they call the enslavements of artificial intelligence.
Are these intellectual currents ones whose hopes in the West were disappointed — just as the West disappointed the hopes and expectations of certain Western thinkers — or are their negative visions shaped by events? The subaltern current is in origin a vision and a philosophy possessed by the idea that colonialism persists even within the sciences. Yet in the recent events in Gaza, dozens of them, Arabs and non-Arabs, sided with Palestine. The problem is that we who attack the Israeli occupation in the terms of international humanitarian law, the United Nations Charter, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights find ourselves at odds with the thinkers of the subaltern current, who will not accept these formulations — on the grounds that the West which invented them no longer holds to them, or the massacre would not have occurred.
