Revolution and Disenchantment: An Interview with Fadi Bardawil
Katy Montoya
Katy Montoya, an MA candidate in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University sat down with Fadi Bardawil, Assistant Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, to discuss his book: Revolution and Disenchantment: Arab Marxism and the Binds of Emancipation.
Katy Montoya (KM): At the heart of Revolution and Disenchantment lies the question of—or tension between—theoretical anti-imperialism and practical anti-imperialism. You address this question by bringing to the fore debates fought out amongst the 1960s Arab Left, focusing on the historically neglected archive of the Marxist group Socialist Lebanon. Taking this group’s engagement with revolutionary theory and practice as your point of departure, you speak to contemporary contestations of theory and practice, both in the academy and in light of the more recent Arab Revolutions. In my reading, amongst your central concerns is the simultaneous importance and neglect of the power of theory; you attest to the Anglophone academy—focused on theoretical anti-imperialism—a belatedness vis-à-vis periphery militant thinkers. Can you say more as to how scholars should study metropole and periphery thinkers in tandem?
Fadi Bardawil (FB): I hear many different things in your questions. The first thing I hear resonates with one of the main themes of the book, which you render as the simultaneous importance and neglect of the power of theory. I tackle it by investigating the authority of theory: what does the theory authorize in terms of political practices? What kind of performative effects does it produce in the world?
I do think that there is simultaneously too much authority that's granted to theory and too little. Let me spell out what I mean by that. There are some thinkers who attribute a lot of what happens in the world— radical transformations of the world, ontological violence—to the discursive assumptions of particular theories. So, for example, you can think of an earlier debate from a few decades ago when people were saying that relativism as a philosophical position is a danger to political and social orders. Or you can take a more recent debate spurred by Bruno Latour - “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam?”- a few years ago, who argued that critique had been appropriated by its enemies on the Right and that maybe we should leave that behind. The relationship of theory to the world is taken to be a direct, unmediated one. The thinkers who make those arguments grant too much authority to theory. But I do think that, at the same time, there is too little attention given to theory because—and this is what I tried to do in the book—there is not enough historical and ethnographic investigation that’s done to think about how it is translated and used. I set out to answer questions such as: how is theory appropriated? How is it transfigured? How does it sometimes move from being a critical theory to becoming a political ideology? How does a work of critique, like Edward Said’s Orientalism, become appropriated by certain political forces, be they Arab nationalists or Islamists, for example, and included in their ideological arsenal that is marshaled against the West.
To do this kind of work is to move away from adhering to the view that theory has its practical effects contained a priori in its epistemological infrastructure, in its discursive assumptions. As you mentioned, the question of the authority of theory is something that interests me both in the works of critics, like Edward Said, and in the leftist tradition of thought and practice, which values theory greatly. Socialist Lebanon, the organization I worked on, was fond of quoting Lenin’s “Without revolutionary theory, there can be no revolutionary movement.” Theory has a lot of authority in the Marxist tradition as the fundamental body of work that can authorize political positions and particular political programs. That's how I hear the first part of your question about the often-simultaneous importance and neglect of theory’s powers, which I addressed by doing a historiographical and ethnographic analysis of the multiple social lives of theory.
But there is a second part to your question, which I would like to hear more from you about. You attributed to me a position that I think that Anglophone academia is belated vis-a-vis the militant thinkers in Lebanon. And then you put that into two sections whereby the militant thinkers are political anti-imperialists and the ones in the diaspora are theoretical anti-imperialists. I do not recognize these binaries in the work I do, so I would like to hear more from you. What do you mean?
KM: What I'm trying to distinguish between is theory that unravels in a place of urgency, for example, the way that a certain understanding of theory in Socialist Lebanon's reading circles and interpretation circles took a secondary importance to the praxis of that theory, because there was an immediate need to put that theory in practice due to the onset of the civil war. That immediacy and urgency that characterizes how theory is grappled with in the periphery stands in contrast or opposition to theory that solely develops away from a situation of urgency and of the need for praxis.
FB: When I mentioned belatedness, I wasn’t referring to theoretical anti-imperialism, by which I mean the strategy of ideological unveiling of particular epistemological assumptions that some critics put on the side of Empire, such as universal, liberal and secular ones. What I was trying to get at is something very different. If you take the kind of work that was being done in European anthropology about Lebanon in the 1960s and the 1970s, and you compare it to the kind of work that was being done by Socialist Lebanon, you get a very, very interesting view. Basically, what you get is that the members of Socialist Lebanon were reading works by Gramsci, Marx, Fanon, and Foucault, while anthropologists were still grappling with the legacies of structural functionalism, and the problems of political power and historical transformation. It was before anthropology, so to speak, had its reckoning with its colonial encounter, to cite Talal Asad (1973). What I was after did not have to do with imperialism, but with the multiple temporalities, and stakes, of intellectual and political spaces. Militants in Beirut were reading works which years later, in the wake of anthropology’s moment of reckoning with how the knowledge it produced were entangled in a particular form of colonial power, will be incorporated into the academic discipline’s body of theory. In a way, it was my attempt to flip the theory of belatedness, the assumption that the Arab world is a traditional place which is always lagging behind the modern West: if you compare the works that were produced and the corpus read by Socialist Lebanon in the 60s, the belatedness is related to the temporalities at the heart of metropolitan disciplines. For instance, I cite Emrys Peters, who was a Manchester anthropologist working in southern Lebanon at that time. He was doing fieldwork in and writing about the same region that a lot of these militant intellectuals grew up in. It's fascinating to see the difference: while he was doing genealogies of Shi`i families, drawing on equilibrium models before criticizing them later on, they were thinking about revolution, imperialism, Gramsci and hegemony and different logics of power at work in Lebanon.
KM: So in many ways it seems that the academy is just now grappling with this, with events, questions or praxis that took place forty years ago? Your book is one such example of a certain kind of praxis predicated on new interpretations of metropolitan theory that entered into the Euro-American academy, later. Is that a fair characterization?
FB: Sure. That has to do with the lost archive of Arab Marxism. You're raising important questions about what gets studied, when, and by whom. I think you're trying to think more about what is now called theory from the Global South. And my position on how to work with these questions, as I articulated it in the book, is that I do not think it's helpful to pick, say a concept and say this is a concept from the global south, and we are translating it and using it because it tackles what critical theory produced in Europe and America did not address. It becomes a process of filling a void and/or representing in thought this part of this world. I think the way to engage theories from the South is to actually to do labor, not on one isolated thinker or two, a concept or two, but rather to immerse oneself in labors of excavation, reconstruction and critical assessment of these traditions of theoretical inquiry, while trying to grasp the stakes that were animating them; stakes that are conceptual and ideological and which supplement the understanding of the historical conditions they were working in. What David Scott calls a “problem space.”
Instead of thinking of theory from the South exclusively via categories of identity, say as an Arab concept or a Muslim thinker, it would be, I think, very fruitful to really do the work of thinking about the problem spaces that generate concepts, which at times resonate with certain political initiatives. And to do that, I do think that you have to, as I try to do in the book, think the question of theory in tandem with the questions of history and ethnography. In doing so, we get a thicker sense of particular traditions and conceptual or ideological projects, which facilitates gauging the kinds of resonances they could have in our present. There is also a gain in reflexivity, since this kind of work throws into sharp relief the stakes animating certain disciplinary problem-spaces animating in the global north. What I am after is developing strategies that both seek to counter reification and enable wider transdisciplinary excavation sites which could be generative for, amongst other things, comparative thinking.
KM: One of the motivations for this question is my own experience in graduate seminars in which the syllabi are divided into extensive, well-thought-out themes. And a sampling of figures is brought in, especially in introductory classes where one studies the canon. Then, in order to fulfill a quota of bringing in non-Western, non-white thinkers, there's a miscellaneous category tacked onto the end about Global South thinkers. Despite the fact that they talk about very disparate things, they're placed together on the syllabus. The labor of thinking through what their individual contributions are and distilling themes from their works is not carried out. I appreciate your emphasis on the labor that goes into finding a much more appropriate place for them within syllabi.
FB: You said it better than I did! That's what's partially animating what I said earlier. These intellectual traditions have historical depths, have resonances across different constituencies. And to just pluck or pick a concept or a thinker, to just say that you're representing an area, or a tradition is precisely an attitude of nonengagement. And as you just said, to have a serious engagement, you need time. You need it to excavate these traditions, as opposed to having a whole coherent canon and then have a figure from outside of it that functions as a placeholder for the Other. To do so does not call that particular canon into question. Nor does it enable a proper dialogical engagement that could shed new light on how it was stitched together. To sum up, there are two problems with this strategy, I hear you saying: theories from the south are plucked to represent difference, and in doing so there is no real conversation that takes place. It’s a missed encounter.
KM: Absolutely. A missed encounter. I will move on to the second question. It is clear that there is much that can be recovered from and emulated in the ethos of the Socialist Lebanon militancy. I, for one, particularly enjoyed learning about how these militant thinkers at times modeled a non-hierarchical approach to global versus local issues and also a non-specialization approach. At the same time, it is important as “an individual historian”, in Beydoun’s words, to steer clear of falling into a nostalgic romanticism of these historical figures. One Arabic language critique of your book, written by a Lebanese scholar, suggests that you fall into a form of hagiographic history, particularly when it comes to the figure of Waddah Charara. Their critique attributes this to Socialist Lebanon's relatively fringe status, especially in comparison to the Lebanese Communist Party, Waddah Charara’s contradictory views throughout his career as well as the minority status of both, as you often point to throughout your book. I am wondering how you perceive the reception of your book, particularly the reception of your book among individuals with close links to the history you write about. How do you imagine that proximity to this recent history, memory and personal experience, impact the reception of and reactions to the history you've written? What are the implications of your book being received as a romantic, nostalgic history of these militant thinkers by a reading public that is personally connected to this history?
FB: This is a fascinating and big question. Let me just start by saying that I do state very clearly that the book is not a comprehensive study of the Lebanese left. The idea of calling Socialist Lebanon a fringe organization compared to the larger Lebanese Communist Party misses, I think, what is animating this book – a set of conceptual questions about the meditations of theory and practice and historical questions about the rise of the new left that came into being in the mid to late 1960s, and which did not revolve around the Soviet orbit like the Lebanese Communist Party. These questions are what propelled me to pay attention to the trajectories of this generation of militant intellectuals who started their political lives as Arab nationalists before becoming Marxist critics of pan-Arabism and ending up as critics of communal – sectarian, regional, familial relations of solidarity. Most of them were born between the late 1930s and the late 1940s. They are, in a sense, Lebanon’s first post-independence leftist generation whose lives were traversed by these questions. So, if we’re comparing numbers, Socialist Lebanon was of course a much smaller organization than the LCP. But it’s not only a matter of the size of the organization. These organizations have a different genealogy – the LCP was founded forty years earlier – and a different relation to Moscow. And what this book focused on is twofold. Historically, the fascinating trajectories of those whose lives moved from nation to class to community. Theoretically, the imaginaries and theoretical work of militant intellectuals who were Communists but very heterodox in their influence and production, think Fanon, Castoriadis, al-Jabarti, Luxembourg, Lacan. How they combined these sources, transfigured them, and incorporated them in their own original works is at the heart of this project.
You mentioned what I call their minoritarian status. Let me just say a couple of words about that, because from the question one could get a sense that being a small organization, which has a fringe status, means that these are isolated people with no real effect. Socialist Lebanon was really a very small organization composed of militant intellectuals for the most part. Yet after the defeat of the Arab armies against Israel in 1967, they had very tangible political effects by merging with the much larger radicalized Lebanese faction of the Arab nationalist movement that was interested in a fusion with them because of their theoretical virtuosity. What I mean by the minoritarian status of this tradition is therefore not meant to qualify their political impact, or the number of adherents to the party. Actually, it is something akin to what is sometimes called a heterodox Marxism that was not, so to speak, the aspect of the tradition that you would identify with if you're looking at mainstream communist parties. In their particular case, I use it to denote the body of work they produced which incorporated a multiplicity of sources and was neither historicist, nor subscribed to modernization theory while also steering away from the culturalist positions of intellectuals, some of whom were Marxists, like Sadiq al-Azm in the wake of the 1967 defeat. Socialist Lebanon’s members were not talking about the backwardness of the Arabs, nor were they discussing what was wrong with traditional Arab values. In fact, they were dissecting the logics of power and the technologies of rule of Nasser's regime and the Ba‘ath.
And they were very much aware of the question of minorities; the Kurdish question, they wrote a bit about that. They were also very much aware, very early on in the 1960s, of how the Palestinian question and its legitimacy could be used instrumentally by those in power to legitimize their rule and repress political dissidents, i.e. in the legacy of takhwīn [accusations of treason]. These two points, takhwīn and the question of minorities, will be picked up decades later by Arab liberals who articulated them from very different ideological grounds. That's what I also mean by their minoritarian status: the fact that they subjected the external forces – colonialism and imperialism – and the internal ones – the postcolonial regimes – to a ruthless critique while steering away from culturalism, so to speak. And that I found very, very interesting.
To speak to the last part of your question: Could the book be read as a romantic, nostalgic history of these militant thinkers? What I tried to do is to steer away from two dominant, and in my view problematic, ways of looking at the history of the 1960s left. The first is a melancholic reading. I prefer the term melancholic over nostalgic. This reading is attached to the 1960s as the great golden age of internationalist solidarity; after that, everything goes downhill – you have endless civil wars, ruthless authoritarian regimes, and an Islamic revival which attacks the Left and marginalizes it. The problem for me with this melancholic reading is that the strong attachment to and idealization of that past renders the present weightless. Nothing can happen in the present that can open up new horizons. It’s akin to a complete surrender of the possibility of any emancipatory political practice. This is not my position. In part, because of the seismic event that happened a decade ago – the first wave of the Arab revolutions. It is very easy to imagine how someone who is still melancholically attached to the 1960s as the golden age cannot even see the Arab revolutions as an event and attuned to the structures of feeling emerging in its wake.
I'm also trying to steer away from – and I put these two figures in the same camp, even though they don't like to be put in the same one – Islamist and liberal triumphalism. Liberal triumphalism is the one that says to you, “well, you know, the Soviet Union, the left—that world has crumbled, and therefore, what use is there in going back to that experiment if it was proved historically that the experiment was a failure?” And Islamic triumphalism also says that this [left] experiment has failed, but also adds that this thought was an exogenous thought, call it foreign, call it Western. It’s not thought that's good for our societies, and therefore, why go back to it? I tried to carve away between the pitfalls of melancholia and dismissal.
But let me go back to the probing question you asked about how the fact that this book is about the very recent past is going to affect its reception. One can never be sure of how one’s work is going to be read. The labors of historical excavation and ethnographic research the book is engaged in are in part an invitation to an intergenerational conversation. At times, presenting my work in public with members of the generation I write about in the audience resulted in debate, which could take the form of a contestation of the authority of my account. I am writing about, and interpreting, events that someone else lived, witnessed, made. The authority of lived experience was marshalled to contest the authority of my own historical-ethnographic account. But I am situated, like they are, albeit differently. I think it was Zygmunt Bauman who said that any writing about intellectuals is not only a representation but also a self-representation, because of the reflexivity involved in the process. To write about intellectuals, you have to be an intellectual yourself. There is no way that I am extricated from what I am writing about, and it is difficult for me to predict what will resonate with readers from different shades of the left, outside the left, or from different generational locations, and what they’ll find problematic. The only thing I hope for is that the book generates arguments because that means that these questions still matter enough to be debated in the present and are not an antiquarian pastime.
KM: How do you respond to this contestation of authority when you're presenting your work?
FB: First, by underscoring that there is no one way of reading an archive. You are situated in a present and you're interested in particular sets of questions. That is what is animating how you're examining that archive. That conversation about divergent readings then become itself the stuff of an intergenerational argument, not only about the archive— the archive could become the excuse—but about what matters and for whom. To give you a more concrete example, the conversation could take the form of someone saying: “This is a minor point, why are you writing about it? Why are you overemphasizing it?”
The archive itself becomes the body of texts that enables different positions to be staked in a particular space of arguments in the present. That's what traditions are, following Alasdair MacIntyre’s elaboration that Talal Asad reworks in “The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam”. There is no way of settling the question once and for all. And that's fine.
KM: Another question about the archive and knowledge production. As you said, you have had to grapple with the anticipated reception of your work in your own field of anthropology, namely the question of who deserves to be translated and thus gain admission into the pantheon of universal thinkers, as you might phrase it. In other words, you have had to make a claim that your object of study – these lives, discourses and practices are worthy of the minutia of anthropological understanding and translation. Can you tell us about the challenges when first embarking on this project or throughout it in deeming the writings of Socialist Lebanon to be an archive worthy of potentially universal study like any other? And in the same vein, can you share what the difficulties were in preserving the primacy of the situatedness and particularities of Charara, Beydoun, Traboulsi’s production of knowledge, while also, in your rigorous examination and also translation of the writings, de-provincializing them?
FB: There are so many ways in which you can approach this question! One way is through thinking about how to do fieldwork in a tradition that is anchored in what you read in theory seminars in graduate school. How do you experience your primary research material when the distance separating the sticky materiality of the empirical world from the slick, abstract conceptual world of theory is minimal? But at the same time, if you compare working on the Arab left with the anthropology of Islam as well, which is an anthropology of a very rich tradition, what you have here is, again, an inquiry into a rich, discursive tradition, but that is deemed to be less of an Other, so to speak, from the perspective of anthropology. So, what do you do with that? That's one question.
The other question I hear is how you study this body of work in the aftermath of a hegemonic epistemology critique that looks at the archive of contemporary Arab thought, mostly to pinpoint the Orientalist, colonial, and, rigged, discursive assumptions that undergird it. How do you convey the complexity of these works and read them charitably for what they're trying to do as opposed to stand above them and condemn them? Adopting epistemology critique as the main, or exclusive, reading strategy erases the distinctive contours of the problem spaces these thinkers were working within, the stakes that were animating their pursuits, the questions they were attracted to, and the political, pragmatic, effects of their work. Relying on this reading strategy exclusively also reproduces in practice the idea that the Arab world is belated towards the global north in its production of theory. The Arab world, it seems to say, produces these essentializing, self-Orientalizing works that are mired in colonial taxonomies.
To sum up, I had to deal with two challenges methodologically. First, how do you do an anthropology of something that at first glance is not different at all? Translations, interpretations, and theoretical works that draw on Gramsci, Althusser, Marx – the stuff of anthropology seminars. Second, what reading strategy do you adopt? How do you steer away from this problematic strategy that only reads to condemn works on thinkers on the basis of their epistemology?
The way I went about addressing these two challenges is through re-constituting the problem-spaces these militant intellectuals inhabited and re-thinking our understanding of the multiple levels of translation – linguistic and conceptual. I showed that their acts of translations did not subscribe to the binaries of original and copy; and authentic and fake. Rather, the translations were themselves productive of theory. What they were engaged in were not acts of colonial mimicry. They were not producing bad copies of Marx in Arabic. Rather, the Marxist tradition’s universality, was not only the result of positing the universality of class struggle but because it also traveled and circulated: from Cuba to China. In these acts of circulation, in each pitstop, it produced conceptual works that produced its universality in practice.
KM: It' is universality that is actually tested by its ability to travel to these different places.
FB: Absolutely. It's a product of it. Its discursive universality is tested by it, but its actual universality in the world is actually a product of translations.
The labor of the anthropologist then becomes, so to speak, that tracking – that’s part of what I call fieldwork in theory – tracking the multiple social and political lives of theories, how they’re translated, appropriated, embodied. How do they foster certain critical sensibilities? How do they impact one's cultural habitus? All of these questions cannot be answered by saying: oh, look! It's the same name. It's the same author. There’s no difference here. Instead, you move in and out of the text all the time to see how the text participated in fashioning particular political subjectivities, but also how people read it in a very different way and then had a different gloss on it.
In doing that, I tried to develop a method for thinking about the productivity of translations, the different performative effects of theory in the world, but also, of how theory itself is literally embodied: how it partakes in fashioning a cultural habitus that remains there after some withdraw from political practice. It's no coincidence that after these militant intellectuals put an end to their professional political activities, they became university professors, journalists, writers, poets, and novelists. When you cut your teeth on this body of revolutionary theory, you develop a particular discipline of reading, writing, translating, which then becomes integral to who you are. You initially developed these intellectual dispositions and writing and argumentative skills not at the library in Princeton, but in an underground party cell. After disenchantment you move from the party cell back to the university.
KM: Underground instead of undergraduate! And as you know, the praxis and the translation doesn't end with the publication of your work. Now it's being read in the context of refueled upheaval in Beirut, given the very tragic explosion and the questioning around political power. Charara and these other thinkers being excavated for their political praxis and theory can continue having a life and a usage and take on new forms.
FB: Right.
KM: I want to now transition to a question about contemporary Syria, which partly frames your argument for the contemporary relevance of your book. You have also written about these ideas in Al-Jumhuriya, a Syria focused platform. After reading your book, I was left thinking about the delineation between political actions, revolution and civil war in modern Lebanese history and its parallels to Syria's histories of civil and political action, the explosion of its broad-based revolution and the latter's disintegration into an Islamist counter-revolution and civil and global war. Part of your work with other projects is recuperating forgotten histories of civil, democratic and other smaller scale forms of political action that become subsumed into larger histories of discrete revolutions and their undoing. Your book seems to be a decisive intervention into these dominant narratives, revealing to the reader a rich tradition of political thought and action into which major events like the Lebanese Civil War unfold, while only the latter is inscribed onto a larger historical narrative. What can we learn about the example of Socialist Lebanon's militants’ actions followed by their transitions to fighting for the Palestinian liberation struggle that was ultimately curtailed by the Lebanese Civil War? What reflections and insights can this provide for how we view the recent history of people's mobilizations in Syria and the Arab world at large?
FB: One cannot go to Socialist Lebanon now to try and be inspired by the answers they provided to their questions. The world we inhabit is not the world of the mid 1960s and the early 1970s. So how can we think about resonances of that archive in our present and in the aftermath of the Syrian revolution? I think there are many ways in which excavating that archive could give us insight into our recent past and our present. As I said, I don't think it's a question of finding models in the past because when people talk about models, whether it's models of development or models of militancy, what this assumes is a perfect commensurability that negates the labors of translation. And I do think that our present needs to be translated. But there is a lot to learn from the questions they were asking. These are questions that are still salient in, and for, our present. I will give you a few examples: who is the revolutionary subject? What are the different forms a political organization can take? When does an agency of emancipation or an organization turn into one of power?
I do think that the question of organization now is crucial, because obviously we're living through a time when there is definitely a structure of feeling which is anti-hierarchical. And if I am allowed to generalize a bit based on following what's happening in Beirut and other places here and there, there is also a gut feeling, not only against hierarchical organizational structures that a lot of the Marxist-Leninist parties had, Socialist Lebanon being one of them, but also a gut feeling against the masculinist leader figure or savior, the comrade leader and the father of the nation. When you think of the Palestinian Revolution, you think Abu ‘Ammar – Yasser Arafat. We are living in a moment when the question of organization which has to be re-thought has to take into account these deeply anti-hierarchical sensibilities and those against the model of the patriarchal leader.
That said, re-excavating the forgotten archive of Arab Marxism and thinking with the previous generation about how they attempted to articulate a notion of the revolutionary subject, how they thought about the question of organization, how they thought the mediations of theory and practice, and the multiple scales of political practice are crucial for our present which is confronting similar questions. What does it mean to engage in revolutionary struggle? Where is the privileged site of emancipatory politics? Is it in demonstrations? In factories? In neighborhoods? In closed meetings with heads of non-governmental organizations?
They also faced a question which is again salient today, which is: how do you mobilize across differences? This is a crucial question which has to do with thinking political solidarity and building a common project while retaining differences, as opposed to erasing or downplaying difference as the condition of possibility of being together. Moreover, we are still trying to negotiate with forms of power, such as communal solidarities – sectarian, regional, kinship, ethnic – they faced and at times tried to articulate with class struggle.
Even though the contours of our present have shifted, there is still a lot to think with them about. We are inheritors of their dual legacy: the legacy of revolutionary exhilaration, which we experienced at the beginning of Arab revolutions a decade ago, and the legacy of disenchantment that a lot of militants, those who are lucky to have stayed alive or are not in prison, have experienced. Hope and disenchantment, citizens and communal subjects, revolutions and civil wars, murderous regimes and foreign interventions. These are all constitutive of our inheritance, even if they do not exhaust the predicaments of the present and the possibilities of our futures.
Fadi Bardawil is Assistant Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.
Katy Montoya is an MA candidate at Princeton’s University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies.