“A Monster Was Born”: Notes on the Rebirth of the “Corrupt Intellectual”

The first version of this text appeared in How to Begin? Envisioning the Impact of Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, a thesis project edited by Özge Ersoy at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College. A second version appeared in issue 18 of e-flux journal in September 2010. See →

Under Mohamed Ali this production of discourse was driven by an expansionist ambition as well as the need to establish a dynasty.

The deeply orientalist views institutionalized within the educational and cultural system and initiated by the presence of mainly foreign “experts” who held the highest positions within the Egyptian bureaucracy in the first half of the twentieth century introduced another element to this system of definitions. Therefore what we had was a three-way argument around the nature of the state and its peoples.

In the future, this was to have dire consequences: the very idea of national liberation and independence was evacuated of any potential it might have had.

In the systems of power I am attempting to engage here, the regime and its opposition are closer to each other than they imagine, as they share a deep investment in strengthening an allegiance to a national identity regardless of what that identity is supposed to be.

It is important to note that this texture, this loud, strident hysteria, is not some sort of innate quality of the “people” but rather a very sophisticated transmutation of the material conditions those same people live under.

This seemingly minor difference in linguistics is actually highly significant and is the trademark of the discursive order that the corrupt intellectual produces—in service to the regime of power for which he deliberately produces this confusion.

Witness the rhetorical arguments that disingenuously portray injustice and subjugation as the eternal lot of the people. This argument gains credibility by referring to an experience that is innately known to be true, yet it is disingenuous because it portrays it as a static unchanging condition, while it is actually a highly nuanced, continuously mutating condition that has been met with (conveniently forgotten) unwavering resistance.

However, this is not the simple binary of ideals believed in and strived for on one side, and the reality of daily life on the other. Nor is it merely a simple moral hypocrisy. It’s rather a structural property of the social reality that exists in a shared space we can call Egypt.

In a sense, this is the opposite of the dynamics of reification and alienation, the domain of phantasm. I know that I come dangerously close to populism here by proposing some kind of naive belief in the power of the collective to produce real experiences.

But it might be that the popular classes are the least invested in the dominant narrative (as it ultimately serves them the least), while the middle classes are instrumental in forging this narrative, and the wealthy classes directly benefit from it.