Said, E 1982, ‘from “Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies, and Community”’ rpt. in Harrison C & Wood, P (eds) 1992, Art in Theory. 1900- 1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, Blackwell Publishers, Oxford, UK, pp.1086-1088.
Classen, C 1996, ‘Sugar Cane, Coca-Cola and Hypermarkets: Consumption and Surrealism in the Argentine Northwest’ in Howes D (ed), Cross Cultural Consumption: Global Markets, Local Realities, Routledge, London, pp.39-54 plus notes pp.195-208.
Edward Said (November 1935 – September 2003) is a Palestinian born in Jerusalm. He is university professor of Comparative Literature at Columbia University and an influential cultural author (Said 1982, p1086). His book ...view middle of the document...
The essay’s intention seems to be the uncritical situation of ‘noninterference’ and ‘specialization’ that might inform and represent almost entirely current academic and theoretical world and, at the same time, the exposure of a new ethos of interference from a critical consciousness.
Said first discusses the idea of “noninterference”. He (1982, p1087) states that “the particular mission of the humanities is, in the aggregate, to represent noninterference in the affairs of the everyday world”. There is a dynamic cultural force that has focus on the life of humane mind in the academy, politicians has focused on running our society on a significant scale, and the general people having the actual experiences that underlie all the theories that the academics and politicians use to make their decisions. In this reading, noninterference for Said mean that academics, especially in the humanities, function as if their fields are free from interference from the everyday world and as if academics are free from having to interfere themselves and furthermore. Said (1982, p1087) also advocates that there be more exchange of ideas among various segments of society, because “noninterference for the humanist means laissez-faire: ‘they’ can run the country, we will explicate Wordsworth and Schlegel”.
It is Said’s declaration that non-interference and rigid specialization results in a social context where control is easily garnered over individuals and communities not enabled with the technical language and literature studies of a given discussion (Said 1982, p1087). Noninterference in signifying the possibility of inquiry free from the every world, help to cover over but also continue relationships academics often ignore and some would choose to deny. This assertion implies that there is a limit to what most human can learn. Said (1982, p1087) future argues that people need to breakdown the borders between areas of specialization to make critical inroads on exclusionary forms of power, furthermore, this power would arise from the based system of ‘journalism and the production of information’. He states that
Instead of noninterference and specialization, there must be interference, a crossing of borders and obstacles, and a determined attempt to generalize exactly at those points where generalizations seem impossible to make.
Said 1982, p1087
The secondary reading ‘Sugar Cane, Coca-Cola and Hypermarkets: Consumption and Surrealism in the Argentine Northwest’ is reading about the impact of global consumerism in a specific context. Classen in this essay has depicted that global consumerism embodies a form of cultural imperialism imposed by the developed countries that might not overwhelm or disruption the traditional local culture. However, Classen wonders that the foreign products were often co-opted and re-invented within...
