ABSTRACT
This chapter articulates some of the problems with traditional humanist approaches to the intractable cultural conflicts of the Middle East, particularly their tendency to lapse into dualistic formulations that reinforce rather than alleviate conflict. Said discusses the conflicts as a struggle for ownership of language and he marks the importance of what he calls the ‘aesthetic sphere’: a sphere not generally considered in political negotiations but one with practical value for conducting politics outside of the circular vocabularies of international economic and political power structures. This focus challenges the ways in which the ‘aesthetic’ has been marginalized and trivialized since the eighteenth century, and not least by contemporary media. The aesthetic sphere is the only one, Said argues, in which it is possible to conduct real education, where participants can emerge into the problematic of every situation including even the problematic that grounds their own preconceptions. He points beyond the hopeless fractiousness of narrowly conceived discussions of postmodernity, to the problems of resistance and commitment that belong centrally to postmodernity conceived in the broad sense indicated in the first chapter here. This chapter demonstrates, among other things, the adaptability to contemporary conditions of traditional humanistic, even Socratic approaches to dialogue. The idea of an ‘aesthetic realm’, however, moves well beyond traditional approaches to join with more radical ones on the return of repressed or excluded powers: a return which serves to enrich the impoverished and singular conceptions of political exchange based on ‘market’ metaphors.
