This is a podcast from the archives of the BBC Reith Lectures.

This lecture in the series Representation of the Intellectual,

given by Edward Said, was originally broadcast in 1993.

In my last lecture, I spoke about the way an intellectual can become a professional

who specialised in one bit of turf, accredited, careful, speaking not the general

language of a wide audience, but rather the approved jargon of a group of insiders.

For not only does this shield the individual from a coarse reality, it also gives one a sense

of moral and certainly technical superiority. During the mid-1960s, just a short while before opposition to the Vietnamese War became very vocal and widespread,

I was approached by an older-looking undergraduate student at Columbia for admission to a seminar with limited enrollment.

Part of his line to me was that he was a veteran of the war,

having served there in the Air Force. As we chatted, he provided me with a fascinatingly eerie

glimpse into the mentality of the professional, in this case a seasoned pilot, whose vocabulary

for his work could be described as insidees.

I'll never forget the shock I received when in responding to my insistent question,

what did you actually do in the Air Force? He replied, target acquisition.

It took me several more minutes to figure out that he was a bombardier whose job it was, well, to bomb.

But he had coated it in a professional language that in a certain sense was meant to exclude and mystify the rather more direct probings of a rank outsider.

I did take him into the seminar, by the way, perhaps because I thought I could

keep an eye on him and, as an added inducement, persuade him to drop the appalling jargon.

Target acquisition, indeed. In a more consistent and sustained way, I think, intellectuals who

are close to policy formulation and can control patronage of the

kind that gives or withholds jobs, stipends, promotions, tend to watch out for individuals who do

...