a “regularizing collectivity...itself governed by the archive.”^120 Adnnls’
search for power relations as they operate through literary discourse is rigor-
ously upheld. To sustain his systematic pairing, he neglects competitive
layering within each text. He ends up with a tendency to groupings and
divisions subsuming conceptualized tradition. Foucault cautions against the
notion of tradition, which, under such groupings, becomes a circulation of
“history in the form of the same,” in order “to pursue without discontinuity
the endless search for the origin.”^121 Had he resorted to an “archeological
method” with a focus on texts as part of a larger network that invites a
“countervailing power of criticism... to bring the text back to a certain
visibility,” to use Said’s summation of Foucault’s discourse analysis (The
World, 184), Adnnls might have escaped generalizations. Comparison with
other cultures might have proved useful in this instance to distance the
discussion and bring into it other comparable situations where readings of
tradition, origin, and classical discourse would have helped in exploding the
mystique of the past and uncovering its inner workings. Adnnls lists as
follows the literary repercussions of this classical discourse: (1) The separation
between language and meaning, form and content; (2) the view of poetry as
a craft; (3) the sacralization of poetic heritage; (4) the prominence of the jurist
as representative of Arab civilization; (5) the emphasis on consensus; and
(6) the glorification of the past as the perfect, against which both the present
and the future “are symbols of degeneration and decadence;” he adds in
Al-Thmbit wa- al-muta.awwil(1: 111–16).
Adnnls’ “mutable” element as a historical dynamic survives in dissent with
its outspoken manifestoes and daring opposition. Here, he could have served
as “...a counter memory for the text,” to use Said’s words again (Ibid.), and
searched for the unsaid in the dominating literary discourse as well, in the
writings of such ‘Abbmsid apologetics as al-Jm.iz. As Foucault argues in
The Archaeology of Knowledge, “The manifest discourse...is really no more
than the repressive presence of what it does not say; and this ‘unsaid’ is a
hollow that undermines from within all that is said” (Ibid. 25). The oppos-
ing culture is the dissenting voice that offers different interpretations and
interrogates platitudes and assumptions to the extent of creating a political
consciousness that is in tune with major political incursions and popular
uprisings (Al-Thmbit wa- al-muta.awwil, 1: 223–57).
While fundamental tenets are behind hegemonic discourse, in literary
terms they imparted the “... tendency to oratory edification,” says Adnnls
(Ibid. 1: 141). In another instance and with cogent phrase, the poet-critic
argues the case in terms of hegemonic strictures and ideological manipula-
tion. Ideology attempts to entangle the poetic in its battle, emptying it of its
potential freedom, and reproducing it as a political text. In search for an orig-
inary unity, nationalist ideology “perceives the poetic text as a battleground
between ideas and current tendencies: it makes the poetic text a political
text.”^122
THE TRADITION/MODERNITY NEXUS