Issues of class and culture: an interview with Aijaz Ahmad - Interview

Monthly Review, Oct, 1996 by Ellen Meiksins Wood

The real question, then, is: why does one need to reiterate a truth so obvious? I think that the institutionalizing of certain kinds of radicalism has gone hand in hand with a certain sanitization of vocabulary, which is ultimately quite devastating for thought itself. One begins with the idea that there is some economic determination in social life but also that, as Althusser famously put it, "the lonely hour" of that final determination "never comes." In the next step, one forgoes the idea of economic determination altogether. Then, the critique of capitalism is sundered from any forthright affirmation of what might replace it. So, the more anti-bourgeois, and anti-colonial etc. one becomes, the less one talks about socialism as a determinate horizon. In the process, critiques of capitalism are also sundered from any necessity of working class politics. Indeed, one may use the word "bourgeois," in a cultural sort of sense, but the word "proletariat" makes one distinctly uncomfortable, as if using such words is some kind of anti-social activity. One may speak of any number of disorientations and even oppressions but one cultivates all kinds of politeness and indirection about the structure of capitalist class relations in which those oppressions are embedded. To speak of any of that directly and simply is to be "vulgar." In this climate of Aesopian languages it is absolutely essential to reiterate that most things are a matter of class. That kind of statement is I think surprising only in a culture like that of the North American university in which radicalism has not had a powerful connection with movements of the working class in a long time. But it is precisely in that kind of culture that people need to hear such obvious truths.

Q: You have made some very trenchant criticisms of contemporary literary and cultural writings by thinkers who are very influential on the intellectual left. These criticisms have generated a great deal of controversy. What aspects of your criticisms seem to have been most difficult for people to accept? Why? Have you been surprised by the reaction? Have people been missing the point? What do you regard as most important of your criticisms? Do you want to set the record straight in any way?

Ahmad: I can say quite truthfully - I don't mean I am necessarily right, but I do think - that no real controversy on my book has ever taken place. I said earlier that so far as I am concerned, the burden of the main argument is contained in the Introduction and the last chapter. To my knowledge, no one has engaged with those in print. The chapter that has had the most electrifying effect in literary circles in India, the one on Indian literature, has never been discussed in the West; most people who have commented on my book there simply don't know what I'm talking about. Most critics latch on to the three middle chapters, about individuals and largely about individual texts, but in ways that I find bewildering. I have said that Jameson is to my mind the most important living literary theorist in the English language today, from whom I have learned a great deal but I am writing critically about him because I reject the idea that every text from the Third World is to be read as a "national allegory" and the further idea that nationalism is the determinate answer to what Jameson calls "American postmodern culture." This very high praise for Jameson - (Is he really that much better than Eagleton?) - I am not inventing now, "to set the record straight"; it is there in the very essay I wrote in response to his essay. No one has yet refuted what I have actually said about "national allegory," etc; but it is alleged that what I have said amounts to "attack," "vilification," and so on - without any citation of any discourteous phrase I might have used about Jameson. The same sort of thing has happened about my criticism of Rushdie. I have been calling Khomeini a "clerical fascist" since the day he took power - when some of the more notable defenders of Rushdie were being very enthusiastic about the so-called revolutionary tradition of the Irani clergy and were concentrating only on the misrepresentation of Islam in the U.S. media - you only have to look at Edward Said's Covering Islam and the issue of Race and Class which covered the Irani Revolution at that time to see what I mean. But I am accused of waging a jihad against Rushdie, as someone has written in the prestigious U. S. journal, Public Culture.