Lately there has been much loose talk about tradition. Whether the rise in the desire to revive “tradition” as a conceptual framework for one’s political, religious, or sociocultural convictions and action derives from the parallel rise of political conservatism in the United States and the United Kingdom, two powerhouses of the postmodern West, and of religious fundamentalism in Asia, the Middle East, and even in the United States; whether the revival of tradition publicly manifests a worldwide private and innate urge to restore memory to a position of prominence in public life, especially in the sophisticated jockeying for strategic positions of power in global relationship; whether the evocation of tradition is a postmodern ethical action prompted by classical principles of Platonic virtue — these are debatable questions at best, and I will stay away from that debate in this essay. What concerns me here are three current issues that Edward Said’s cultural critique both highlights and recuperates: (1) the nature of the traditions invoked, and the evolution of the framing of this invocation; (2) the selective amnesia that colors the collective memory underlying the individual theorizations of traditions; and (3) the tasks of a proper archaeology of critical theory if these traditions are to be useful in the future. The question “What would Said say?” serves to frame these issues in a postcolonialist, postnationalist rhetoric by drawing on Said’s quarter-century-old exposé of orientalism, though it returns no romantic reply.
