Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979)
Introduction
Said starts by asserting the fact that the Orient played an instrumental role in the construction of the European culture as the powerful Other: “the Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience.” (1-2) He then states that the research subject of his book is Orientalism, by which he understands a combined representation of the Orient in the Western culture, science, politics, etc. and, transcending the borders of all these field of knowledge, it becomes “a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between "the Orient" and (most of the time) "the Occident,"” (2) and finally it transforms into a powerful political instrument of domination: “Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.” (3) As Said is a Marxist, there is no wonder that it is this third incarnation of Orientalism, domination, that he cares most of all for.
In the Foucaultian tradition, Said suggests to look at Orientalism as a discourse:
without examining Orientalism as a discourse one cannot possibly understand the enonnously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage-and even produce-the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively during the post-Enlightenment period. (3)
He then states that the Western image of the Orient—i.e. Orientalism—had little to do with the “real” Orient. What is more important, Orientalism is not simply the work of European imagination—it is all about power, domination, hegemony and authority. As such, Orientalism was not “simply” a collection of misrepresentations about the Orient in Europe, it “created body of theory and practice in which, for many generations, there has been a considerable material investment,” (6) material investment here meaning academic scholarship, art, literature, political writing, common sense, etc. In this way, Orientalism in the European culture became an instrument for maintaining “content” (in Gramscian terms), i.e. voluntary reproduction by the subjects of the social reality desired by the power. In this way, Orientalism is a phenomenon of the same rank as the idea of Europe.
Said then ask how relevant it is on his side to consider as one phenomenon what was supposed to be, actually, two: individual writing (particularly in case of literary fiction) and hegemonic strategies. He then goes into a lengthy explanation of why he considers this to be relevant. First, he asserts that there is no “pure” knowledge, but rather all knowledge is shaped by ideological positions:
No one has ever devised a method for detaching the scholar from the circumstances of life, from the fact of his involvement (conscious or unconscious) with a class, a set of beliefs, a social position, or from the mere activity of being a member of a society. (10)
The same, he argues, is the case with literature. The link between ideology and writing is not simplistic at all, but still it is unavoidable. He describes this link in the following way:
Orientalism is not a mere political subject matter or field that is reflected passively by culture, scholarship, or institutions; nor is it a large and diffuse collection of texts about the Orient; nor is it representative and expressive of some nefarious "Western" imperialist plot to hold down the "Oriental" world. It is rather a distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical, and philological texts, <…> it is, rather than expresses, a certain will or intention to understand, in some cases to control, manipulate, even to incorporate, what is a manifestly different (or alternative and novel) world; it is, above all, a discourse that is by no means in direct, corresponding relationship political power in the raw, but rather is produced and exists in an uneven exchange with various kinds of power, shaped to a degree by the exchange with power political, <…> intellectual, <…> cultural <…> moral… (12)
Hence Said’s research agenda: to study Orientalism “as a dynamic exchange between individual authors and the large political concerns shaped by the three great empires-British, French, American-in whose intellectual and imaginative territory the writing was produced.” (15) His research question is, logically, “How did philology, lexicography, history, biology, political and economic theory, novel-writing, and lyric poetry come to the service of Orientalism's broadly imperialist view of the world?” (15) as well as some other related to its evolution in time and the relationship between the individual effort and this collective project.
Said then discusses his methodology. He, first, claims that there was a need to specify the corpus of his sources, therefore, he focused on French and British, later American sources on Islamic countries, and provides a rationale for this choice, Britain and France as the most important imperial powers, the US as occupying their place after the WWII, Islam as the “Near Orient,” which has been in contact with Europe for over a century.
As for his methodological focus, Said’s project is about fighting the dominant power:
There is nothing mysterious or natural about authority. It is formed, irradiated, disseminated; it is instrumental, it is persuasive; it has status, it established canon of taste and value; it is virtually indistinguishable from certain ideas it dignifies as true, and from traditions, perceptions, and judgements it forms, transmits, reproduces. Above all, authority can, indeed must, be analyzed. (20)
His technics of analysis involve
strategic location, which is a way of describing the author's position in a text with regard to the Oriental material he writes about, and strategic formation, which is a way of analyzing the relationship between texts and the way in which groups of texts, types of texts, even textual genres, acquire mass, density, and referential power among themselves and thereafter in the culture at large. (20)
He explains that every author writing about the Orient must take a position vis-à-vis the Orient, which means that he or she should translate into his or her text the symbolic constructions created by Orientalism in its previous or contemporary incarnations:
Every writer on the Orient (and this is true even of Homer) assumes some Oriental precedent. some previous knowledge of the Orient, to which he refers and on which he relies. Additionally, each work on the Orient affiliates itself with other works, with audiences, with institutions, with the Orient itself. The ensemble of relationships between works, audiences, and some particular aspects of the Orient therefore constitutes an analyzable formation… (20)
Any text about the Orient is always exterior to the object it describes (i.e., Orient). Therefore, there are no “natural depictions” of the Orient, there are only representations of it. What is important in this observation is that “these representations rely upon institutions, traditions, conventions, agreed-upon codes of understanding for their effects, not upon a distant and amorphous Orient,” (22) which means that Orientalist texts are always more about the West than about the Orient.
Chapter 1. The Scope of Orientalism
1. Knowing the Oriental
Said starts by analyzing public speeches and writings of two British imperialists of the early 20th century about the Egypt, making an emphasis on how the stress that since the British imperial authorities “know better” their country, they have a natural right to rule it:
British knowledge of Egypt is Egypt for Balfour, and the burdens of knowledge make such questions as inferiority and superiority seem petty ones. Balfour nowhere denies British superiority and Egyptian inferiority; he takes them for granted as he describes the consequences of knowledge. (32)
Any doubt in this right is dangerous, as it destroys the faith of both “Arabs” and colonial officers in what they are doing.
This mode of seeing the Orient turned into the dominant political vision:
The most important thing about the theory during the first decade of the twentieth century was that it worked, and worked staggeringly well. The argument, when reduced to its simplest form, was dear, it was precise, it was easy to grasp. There are Westerners, and there are Orientals. The former dominate; the latter must be dominated, which usually means having their land occupied, their internal affairs rigidly controlled, their blood and treasure put at the disposal of one or another Western power. (36)
Political domination had to be justified, therefore, in the course of the nineteenth century, a bunch of theories turn up which persisted into the twentieth century and which constructed the colonial subject as inferior to Europeans—in logic, culture, moral, etc. Many resources were invented in this vision of Oriental people, as it justified and legitimized domination:
The Orient was viewed as if framed by the classroom, the criminal court, the prison, the illustrated manual. (41)
The reason why this domination emerged was that at that time Britain and France, two leading colonial powers, divide between them (and other powers) the whole world, but only between them—Middle East. In a way, they cooperated to secure cultural domination over these lands:
And share they <Britain and France> did, in ways that we shall investigate presently. What they shared, however, was not only land or profit or rule; it was the kind of intellectual power I have been calling Orientalism. In a sense Orientalism was a library or archive of information, commonly and, in some of its aspects, unanimously held. (41)
This cultural and academic project of Orientalizing the Orient was institutionalized in learned societies, academic journals, conceptual views (like Darwinism or Marxism), etc. The link between them and the Orientalism as the phenomenon for which they all worked was double-folded: they drew on Orientalism and they gradually transformed it. That it was not a transformation of liberation, but the one of intensification and improvement, is proven, according to Said, by contemporary (1970s) speeches of American politicians who reproduce in their writing the same Oriental myth of the nineteenth century. These myths are represented to us as truth, and Said asks how this situation could emerge. The answer goes in the following sections.
2. Imaginative Geography and Its Representations: Orientalizing the Oriental
Orientalism emerges, first, as an academic discipline within the European mediaeval scholarship and is eventually fully formed by the nineteenth century:
A nineteenth-century Orientalist was therefore either a scholar (a Sinoiogist, an IsIamicist, an Indo-Europeanist) or a gifted enthusiast (Hugo in Les Orientales, Goethe in the Westostlicher Diwan), or both (Richard Burton, Edward Lane, Friedrich Schlegel). (51)
This Orientalism of the nineteenth century was, however, built not upon a “real” encounter with the West, but rather on the basis of the European writing about the East since Ancient Greece. As the result, Orientalism formed as a system of signs which functioned relatively independently from its alleged references in the real world:
In the nineteenth century, Orientalism is very fashionable, but in a very eclectic way, with a focus on the classical period, rather than on modernity, and “the Orient studied was a textual universe by and large; the impact of the Orient was made through books and manuscripts.” (52) The result was “Europe's collective day-dream of the Orient.” (quoted V. G. Kiernan, 52)
Said then discusses that all geographies are imaginative and moves on to inspect the imaginative geography of the Orient: “Almost from earliest times in Europe the Orient was something more than what was empirically known about it.” (55) Already in ancient Greece, “a line <was> drawn between two continents. Europe is powerful and articulate; Asia is defeated and distant.” (57) “It is Europe that articulates the Orient; this articulation is the prerogative, not of a puppet master, but of a genuine creator, whose life-giving power represents, animates, constitutes the otherwise silent and dangerous space beyond familiar boundaries.” (57)
Different travel accounts, literary fiction, histories, which themselves are nearly literature, “are the lenses through which the Orient is experienced, and they shape the language, perception, and form of the encounter between East and West.” (58)
The European vision of Islam became particularly important for the emergence of Orientalism. Islam, due to its attack on European borders during the Middle Ages, was regarded as a threat:
Not for nothing did Islam come to symbolize terror, devastation, the demonic hordes of hated barbarians. For Europe Islam was a lasting trauma. (59)
Since European Christian scholars believed that Islam was a heresy and Mohammed—an impostor, a “false” Christ, “he became as well the epitome of lechery, debauchery, sodomy, and a whole battery of assorted treacheries,” (62) which were later imposed on all Orientals in general.
In general, “Islam became an image… whose function was not so much to represent Islam in itself as to represent it for the medieval Christian.” (60) “This rigorous Christian picture of Islam was intensified in innumerable ways, including—during the Middle Ages and ear1y Renaissance—a large variety of poetry, learned controversy, and popular superstition.” (61)
Said then goes through the European mediaeval writing examining how the image of the Orient was shaped gradually by different authors in the course of time. The aim of these works was to “tame” the Orient, at least in the European imagination, to give its phenomena genealogies, explanations and developments.
3. Projects
In this section, Said considers projects which emerged within Orientalism and shaped it as a threat to the European civilization, as something totally opposed to it. He starts with Abraham-Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron’s and William Jones's expeditions to the Orient and scholarly studies of Sanskrit. His main emphasis in this section is, however, Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt:
For Napoleon Egypt was a project that acquired reality in his mind, and later in his preparations for its conquest, through experiences that belong to the realm of ideas and myths culled from texts, not empirical reality… <Napoleon> saw the Orient only as it had been encoded first by classical texts and then by Orientalist experts, whose vision, based on classical texts, seemed a useful substitute for any actual encounter with the real Orient. (80)
I wonder why Said finds so surprising the fact that Napoleon used literary canon to prepare for his military expedition. There is actually no other way, therefore, there is nothing special in it. Any military campaign is prepared on the basis of literary evidence, and the enemy is always constructed, rather than real. That’s why wars are lost in 50% of cases.
Said emphasizes that Napoleon saw Egypt as his trophy, rather than a country and culture of its own: “Egypt's own destiny was to be annexed, to Europe preferably.” (85)
Description de l'Egypte, a discursive attempt to make Egypt French, 23 large volumes published between 1809 and 1823. This is how Said describes it:
To restore a region from its present barbarism to its former classical greatness; to instruct (for its own benefit) the Orient in the ways of the modem West; to subordinate or underplay military power in order to aggrandize the project of glorious knowledge acquired in the process of political domination of the Orient; to formulate the Orient, to give it shape, identity, definition with full recognition of its place in memory, its importance to imperial strategy, and its "natura1" role as an appendage to Europe; to dignify all the knowledge collected during colonial occupation with the title "contribution to modern learning" when the natives had neither been consulted nor treated as anything except as pretexts for a text whose usefulness was not to the natives; to feel oneself as a European in command, almost at will, of Oriental history, time, and geography; to institute new areas of specialization; to establish new disciplines; to divide, deploy, schematize, tabulate, index, and record everything in sight (and out of sight); to make out of every observable detail a generalization and out of every generalization an immutable law about the Oriental nature, temperament, mentality, custom, or type; and, above all, to transmute living reality into the stuff of texts, to possess (or think one possesses) actuality mainly because nothing in the Orient seems to resist one's powers: these are the features of Orientalist projection entirely realized in the Description de I'Egypte, itself enabled and reinforced by Napoleon's wholly Orientalist engulfment of Egypt by the instruments of Western knowledge and power. (86)
Despite Napoleon’s military failure, his “occupation gave birth to the entire modern experience of the Orient as interpreted from within the universe of discourse founded by Napoleon in Egypt, whose agencies of domination and dissemination included the Institut and the Description… After Napoleon, then, the very language of Orientalism changed radically. Its descriptive realism was upgraded and became not merely a style of representation but a language, indeed a means of creation.” (87) It gave birth to multiple literary works about the Orient that Said discusses later in the section.
Even the building of the Suez Canal was an Orientalist project, as Ferdinand de Lesseps, the leader of the project, appealed not only to commercial, but also civilizing benefits of this project:
Despite its immemorial pedigree of failures, its outrageous cost, its astounding ambitions for altering the way Europe would handle the Orient, the canal was worth the effort. It was a project uniquely able to override the objections of those who were consulted and, in improving the Orient as a whole, to do what scheming Egyptians, perfidious Chinese, and half-naked Indians could never have done for themselves. (90)
IV. Crisis
Said once again argues that the West understood the Orient on the basis of text. He explores different ways of how “expertise” and “competence” represented in texts might, in fact, be far from “reality,” but the cultural inertia will keep on reproducing “wrong” views:
A text purporting to contain knowledge about something actual, and arising out of circumstances similar to the ones I have just described, is not easily dismissed. Expertise is attributed to it. The authority of academics, institutions, and governments can accrue to it, surrounding it with still greater prestige than its practical successes warrant. Most important, such texts can create not only knowledge but also the very reality they appear to describe. In time such knowledge and reality produce a tradition, or what Michel Foucault calls a discourse, whose material presence or weight, not the originality of a given author, is really responsible for the texts produced out of it. (94)
The results of this process were quite obvious: soon in the European cultural world, the Orient as such was completely replaced by the constructed knowledge of Orientalism:
Orientalism overrode the Orient. As a system of thought about the Orient, it always rose from the specifically human detail to the general transhuman one; an observation about a tenth-century Arab poet multiplied itself into a policy towards (and about) the Oriental mentality in Egypt, Iraq, or Arabia. Similarly a verse from the Koran would be considered the best evidence of an ineradicable Muslim sensuality. Orientalism assumed an unchanging Orient, absolutely different (the reasons change from epoch to epoch) from the West. (96)
Said then examines “scholarly advances of Orientalism and the political conquests aided by Orientalism” (100) in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including scholarly societies, authors and politicians, conquests, etc.
With the coming of the nineteenth century, the Orient also turns into a spectacle:
The Orient is watched, since its almost (but never quite) offensive behavior issues out of a reservoir of infinite peculiarity; the European, whose sensibility tours the Orient, is a watcher, never involved, always detached… (103)
And here are result of all these developments by the early twentieth century:
As a judge of the Orient, the modern Orientalist does not, as he believes and even says, stand apart from it objectively. His human detachment, whose sign is the absence of sympathy covered by professional knowledge, is weighted heavily with all the orthodox attitudes, perspectives, and moods of Orienlalism that I have been describing. His Orient is not the Orient as it is, but the Orient as it has been Orientalized. An unbroken arc of knowledge and power connects the European or Western statesman and the Western Orientalists; it forms the rim of the stage containing the Orient. (104)
This situation dominated more or less academia, cultural and political spheres until the end of the Second World War. After it, the political situation changed radically, as Eastern nations acquired independence, while the Cold War divided the world between two new superpowers. Unable to recognize "its" Orient in the new Third World, Orientalism now faced a challenging and politically armed Orient. (104) Two alternatives arose: to pretend as if nothing had changed, or to adapt old ways to the new. Yet, in general, Orientalism was now in crisis. “National liberation movements in the ex-colonial Orient worked havoc with Orientalist conceptions of passive, fatalistic subject races,” (105) in addition, there came an understanding that the entire conceptual apparatus of Orientalism was out-dated.
Despite that, Orientalism still has a firm footing in the Western academia. “The perfidious Chinese, half-naked Indians, and passive Muslims are described as vultures for "our" largesse and are damned when "we lose them" to communism, or to their unregenerate Oriental instincts: the difference is scarcely significant.” (108)
The West is still “the actor, the Orient a passive reactor. The West is the spectator, the judge and jury, of every facet of Oriental behavior.” (109)
Chapter 2. Orientalist Structures and Restructures
1. Redrawn Frontiers, Redefined Issues, Secularized Religion
Romantic Orientalist project
Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis, for example. urged upon their countrymen, and upon Europeans in general, a detailed study of India because, they said, it was Indian culture and religion that could defeat the materialism and mechanism (and republicanism) of Occidental culture. (115)
Four preconditions for the modern Orientalism:
First, in the 18th century, “Orient was being opened out considerably beyond the Islamic lands.” (116) Consequently, attempts at wide comparative studies
Second, attempts at scholarly studies of the lands outside Europe, including usage of original, i.e. non-European, sources: translation of the Koran, etc. (117)
Third, attempts to “exceed comparative study, and its judicious surveys of mankind from "China to Peru," by sympathetic identification.” (118)
Fourth, new classificatory schemas which arouse in the European scholarship, including physiological-moral classification of human beings: “the American is "red, choleric, erect," the Asiatic is "yellow, melancholy, rigid," the African is "black, phlegmatic, lax.” (119)
“The four elements I have described—expansion, historical confrontation, sympathy, classification—are the currents in eighteenth century thought on whose presence the specific intellectual and institutional structures of modern Orientalism depend. Without them Orientalism, as we shall see presently, could not have occurred.” (120)
These are secularizing elements in the European culture. Said claims, that the Orient, in its Orientalized form, served as an instrument which pushed secularization of the European culture, as the contact with the Orient brought into being new cultural elements which destroyed classical religious cultural framework:
For anyone who studied the Orient a secular vocabulary in keeping with these frameworks was required. Yet if Orientalism provided the vocabulary, the conceptual repertoire, the techniques-for this is what, from the end of the eighteenth century on, Orientalism did and what Orientalism was-it also retained, as an undislodged current in its discourse, a reconstructed religious impulse, a naturalized supernaturalism. (121)
It led to a huge cultural shift in Europe:
The modern Orientatist was, in his view, a hero rescuing the Orient from the obscurity, alienation, and strangeness which he himself had properly distinguished. His research reconstructed the Orient's lost languages, mores, even mentalities… In the process, the Orient and Orientalist disciplines changed dialectically, for they could not survive in their original form… Yet both bore the traces of power—power to have resurrected, indeed created, the Orient, power that dwelt in the new, scientifically advanced techniques of philology and of anthropological generalization. (121)
The figure of Orientalist also gradually changed in the course of the 19th century:
The more Europe encroached upon the Orient during the nineteenth century, the more Orientalism gained in public confidence. Yet if this gain coincided with a loss in originality, we should not be entirely surprised, since its mode, from the beginning, was reconstruction and repetition. (122)
In the final passage of the section, Said openly announces his stakes in this project:
Modern Orientalism… embodies a systematic discipline of accumulation. And far from this being exclusively an intellectual or theoretical feature, it made Orientalism fatally tend towards the systematic accumulation of human beings and territories. To reconstruct a dead or lost Oriental language meant ultimately to reconstruct a dead or neglected Orient; it also meant that reconstructive precision, science, even imagination could prepare the way for what armies, administrations, and bureaucracies would later do on the ground, in the Orient. In a sense, the vindication of Orientalism was not only its intellectual or artistic successes but its later effectiveness, its usefulness, its authority. (123)
2. Silvestre de Sacy and Ernest Renan: Rational Anthropology and Philological Laboratory
In this section, Said examines in detail professional work of two scholars whom he regards as instrumental in shaping Orientalism. The first, Silvestre de Sacy, is the founder of this discipline:
Sacy's name is associated with the beginning of modem Orientalism; it is because his work virtually put before the profession an entire systematic body of texts, a pedagogic practice, a scholarly tradition, and an important link between Oriental scholarship and public policy. (124)
As Sacy had to create this discipline from a blank sheet of paper, he invented several important principles, including the principle of the chrestomathy, which shaped the research object:
And since also the vastly rich (in space, time, and cultures) Orient cannot be totally exposed, only its most representative parts need be. Thus Sacy's focus is the anthology, the chrestomathy, the tableau, the survey of general principles, in which a relatively small set of powerful examples delivers the Orient to the student. (125)
The reason why chrestomathy:
Not only are Oriental literary productions essentially alien to the European; they also do not contain a sustained enough interest, nor are they written with enough "taste and critical spirit," to merit publication except as extracts… Therefore the Orientalist is required to present the Orient by a series of representative fragments. fragments republished, explicated, annotated, and surrounded with still more fragments. (128)
The second scholar under scrutiny, Ernest Renan, is remarkable for having “associated the Orient with the most recent comparative disciplines, of which philology was one of the most eminent.” (130) His initial project was to recreated the Semitic protolanguage, which made him a distinguished authority in this field. In doing so, he actually constructed his object, because the Semitic protolanguage cannot, unlike living or even dead written languages, be observed. In doing so, he was quite reactionary:
Everywhere Renan treats of normal human facts—language, history, culture, mind, imagination—as transformed into something else, as something peculiarly deviant, because they are Semitic and Oriental, and because they end up for analysis in the laboratory. Thus the Semites are rabid monotheists who produced no mythology, no art, no commerce, no civilization; their consciousness is a Darrow and rigid one… (141-142)
This is the state of the art with which Orientalism met the twentieth century.
3. Oriental Residence and Scholarship: The Requirements of Lexicography and Imagination
Said continues his critique of Renan’s version of orientalism by stressing that due to linguistic approach employed by the latter, Orientalism was from the very beginning based on strategies of comparison:
Thus a knowing vocabulary developed, and its functions, as much as its style, located the Orient in a comparative framework, of the sort employed and manipulated by Renan. Such comparatism is rarely descriptive; most often, it is both evaluative and expository. (149) Thus did comparatism in the study of the Orient and Orientals come to be synonymous with the apparent ontological inequality of Occident and Orient. (150)
Said then attracts attention to the fact that emotional attitude to the Orient was very uneven among European intellectuals of the nineteenth century: extremities (enthusiasm and disdain) dominated. As the result,
Most often an individual entered the profession as a way of reckoning with the Orient's claim on him; yet most often too his Orientalist training opened his eyes, so to speak, and what he was left with was a sort of debunking project, by which the Orient was reduced to considerably less than the eminence once seen in it. (150-151)
Narrative structures were employed to make coherent a huge mass of random facts about the Orient into texts which “tamed” the Orient and imposed upon it the European vision. Said discusses books about Mohammad published in the 19th century as examples. He then moves on to analyze Karl Marx’s writing about the Orient. Said notes that Marx is undoubtedly sympathetic about the Orient, but when it comes to conceptualizing his insights into contemporary political language, the Orientalist vocabulary starts to shape his writing about India (that particular example):
That Marx was still able to sense some fellow feeling, to identify even a little with poor Asia, suggests that something happened before the labels took over, before he was dispatched to Goethe as a source of wisdom on the Orient. It is as if the individual mind (Marx's, in this -case) could find a precollective, preofficial individuality in Asia—find and give in to its pressures upon his emotions, feelings, senses—only to give it up when he confronted a more formidable censor in the very vocabulary he found himself forced to employ. (155)
Said then analyzes another important factor in the formation of Orientalism, the writing about the Orient while being there in residence. Said claims that the cultural structures of Orientalism were so strong that Europeans who came to the Orient to get a “first-hand experience” actually imposed already existing meanings on what they encountered there. He makes a thorough analysis of Edward William Lane's Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1836). He notes, first, that Lane pretended to be Muslim in order to gain a better access to the Egyptian culture—a fact of domination itself, as
Thus while one portion of Lane's identity floats easily in the unsuspecting Muslim sea, a submerged part retains its secret European power, to comment on, acquire, possess everything around it. (160)
This “subversive” activity is obviously Eurocentric:
What he says about the Orient is therefore to be understood as description obtained in a one-way exchange: as they spoke and behaved, he observed and wrote down. His power was to have existed amongst them as a native speaker, as it were, and also as a secret writer. And what he wrote was intended as useful knowledge, not for them, but for Europe and its various disseminative institutions. (160)
Said then discusses how different behavioral and narrative strategies help Lane to pursue his observation without getting emotionally and physically mixed with Egyptians, such as the use of details in narration, monumental and detailed description, interruptions of narratives.
Said finishes the section by stressing that by the mid-19th century, Orientalism was able to institutionalize itself and organize itself into a specialized body of knowledge. He concludes with this summarizing statement:
On the one hand, Orientalism acquired the Orient as literally and as widely as possible; on the other, it domesticated this knowledge to the West, filtering it through regulatory codes, classifications, specimen cases, periodical reviews, dictionaries, grammars, commentaries, editions, translations, all of which together formed a simulacrum of the Orient and reproduced it materially in the West, for the West. The Orient, in short, would be converted from the personal, sometimes garbled testimony of intrepid voyagers and residents into impersonal definition by a whole array of scientific workers. It would be converted from the consecutive experience of individual research into a sort of imaginary museum without walls, where everything gathered from the huge distances and varieties of Oriental culture became categorically Oriental. It would be reconverted, restructured from the bundle of fragments brought back piecemeal by explorers, expeditions, commissions, armies, and merchants into lexicographical, bibliographical, departmentalized, and textualized Orientalist sense. (166)
4. Pilgrims and Pilgrimages, British and French
Said discusses the last large type of writing about the Orient, travel pilgrimage accounts. From the very beginning, he asserts that
their <pilgrims’> writing was to be a fresh new repository of Oriental experience but, as we shall see, even this project usually (but not always) resolved itself into the reductionism of the Orientalistic. The reasons are complex, and they have very much to do with the nature of the pilgrim, his mode of writing, and the intentional form of his work. (169)
He differentiates between French and English writing, in the way that for British pilgrims, “to write about Egypt, Syria, or Turkey, as much as traveling in them, was a matter of touring the realm of political will, political management, political definition… In contrast, the French pilgrim was imbued with a sense of acute loss in the Orient.” (169) And then:
Consequently French pilgrims from Volney on planned and projected for, imagined, ruminated about places that were principally in their minds; they constructed schemes for a typically French, perhaps even a European, concert in the Orient, which of course they supposed would be orchestrated by them. Theirs was the Orient of memories, suggestive ruins, forgotten secrets, hidden correspondences, and an almost virtuosic style of being an Orient whose highest literary forms would be found in Nerval and Flaubert, both of whose work was solidly fixed in an imaginative. Unrealizable (except aesthetically) dimension. (169-170)
He claims that French (and later he would reiterate that about Englishmen) would be coming to the Orient as in case of Chateaubriand “a constructed figure, not as a true self.” (171) Therefore, a number of prejudices were a priori brought into their accounts:
This is the first significant mention of an idea that will acquire an almost unbearable, next to mindless authority in European writing: the theme of Europe teaching the Orient the meaning of liberty, which is an idea that Chateaubriand and everyone after him believed that Orientals, and especially Muslims, knew nothing about. (172)
As the Oriental experience was regarded through the European vision, consequently, “as a form of growing knowledge Orientalism resorted mainly to citations of predecessor scholars in the field for its nutriment.” (176-177)
This is why even fictional writing and memoir accounts are secondary to the Orientalist picture:
In system of knowledge about the Orient, the Orient is less a place than a topos, a set of references, a congeries of characteristics, that seems to have its origin in a quotation, or a fragment of a text, or a citation from someone's work on the Orient, or some bit of previous imagining, or an amalgam of all these. Direct observation or circumstantial description of the Orient are the fictions presented by writing on the Orient, yet invariably these are totally secondary to systematic tasks of another sort. In Lamartine, Nerval, and Flaubert, the Orient is a re-presentation of canonical material guided by an aesthetic and executive will capable of producing interest in the reader. Yet in all three writers, Orientalism or some aspect of it is asserted, even though, as I said earlier, the narrative consciousness is given a very large role to play. What we shall see is that for all its eccentric individuality, this narrative consciousness will end up by being aware, like Bouvard and Pecuchet, that pilgrimage is after all a form of copying. (177)
Then Said analyzes European travelogues noting that they involve operations of “recognizing,” rather than “learning.” Even the best of them, like Nerval, who refused to impose blindly the established Orientalist networks of meaning on their Oriental experience, presented it, consequently, as chaotic, to the realm of “failed narratives,” because they rejected European narratives about it, but could not see the local narratives:
It is as if having failed both in his search for a stable Oriental reality and in his intent to give systematic order to his re-presentation of the Orient, Nerval was employing the borrowed authority of a canonized Orientalist text. After his voyage the earth remained dead, and aside from its brilliantly crafted but fragmented embodiments in the Voyage, his self was no less drugged and worn out than before. Therefore the Orient seemed retrospectively to belong to a negative realm, in which failed narratives, disordered chronicles, mere transcription of scholarly texts, were its only possible vessel. At least Nerval did not try to save his project by wholeheartedly giving himself up to French designs on the Orienl, although he did resort to Orientalism to make some of his points. (184)
Personal and sensual experiences were, after all, also subordinate to Orientalist structures of meaning, as in case of Flaubert’s Oriental women:
After his voyage, he had written Louise Colet reassuringly that "the oriental woman is no more than a machine: she makes no distinction between one man and another man." (187)
Flaubert’s writing became the basis of Said’s discussion of how the new modes of knowledge in Europe “structure” the reality (in his case, Orient) “like a theatrical, fantastic library, parading before the anchorite's gaze.” (188) From here, he moves on to discuss the emergence of the scholarly apparatus for disseminating Orientalism and disciplining and governing the European society, in Foucaultian terms:
The apparatus serving Oriental studies was part of the scene, and this was one thing that Flaubert surely had in mind when he proclaimed that "everyone will be in uniform." An Orientalist was no longer a gifted amateur enthusiast, or if he was, he would have trouble being taken seriously as a scholar. (191)
Even the most innocuous travel book—and there were literally hundreds written after mid-century—contributed to the density of public awareness of the Orient; a heavily marked dividing line separated the delights, miscellaneous exploits, and testimonial portentousness of individual pilgrims in the East (which included some American voyagers, among them Mark Twain and Herman Melville) from the authoritative reports of scholarly travelers, missionaries, governmental functionaries, and other expert witnesses. (192)
He concludes by addressing Richard Burton's Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to AI-Madinah and Meccah (1855-1856), which he regards as a transitional form of between “between Orientalist genres represented on the one hand by Lane and on the other by the French writers.” (194) Burton, who was highly sympathetic with the Arabs, still promotes, according to Said, the Orientalist project, as he invests his knowledge in the European understanding—and, consequently, structuring—of the Oriental societies:
Burton was an imperialist, for all his sympathetic self-association with the Arabs; but what is more relevant is that Burton thought of himself both as a rebel against authority (hence his identification with the East as a place of freedom from Victorian moral authority) and as a potential agent of authority in the East. It is the manner of that coexistence, between two antagonistic roles for himself, that is of interest. (195) “The problem finally reduces itself to the problem of knowledge of the Orient, which is why a consideration of Burton's Orientalism ought to conclude our account of Orientalist structures and restructures in most of the nineteenth century.” (195)
And finally:
what we read in his prose is the history of a consciousness negotiating its way through an alien culture by virtue of having successfully absorbed its systems of information and behavior. Burton's freedom was in having shaken himself loose of his European origins enough to be able to live as an Oriental. Every scene in the Pilgrimage reveals him as winning out over the obstacles confronting him, a foreigner, in a strange place. He was able to do this because he had sufficient knowledge of an alien society for this purpose. (196)
He then concludes that by the second half of the 19th century, institutionalized structures of knowledge and power replace earlier individual efforts to Orientalize the Orient. This is the legacy of the 19th century which would be fully exploited in the twentieth, as his conclusion to the entire Chapter 2 promises:
This is the legacy of nineteenth-century Orientalism to which the twentieth century has become inheritor. We must now investigate as exactly as possible the way twenlieth century Orientalism-inaugurated by the long process of the West's occupation of the Orient from the 1880s on-successfully controlled freedom and knowledge; in short, the way Orientalism was fully fonnalized into a repeatedly produced copy of itself.
Chapter 3. Orientalism Now
1. Latent and Manifest Orientalism
Said starts by summarizing his observations and conclusions in the two previous chapters:
The work of predecessors, the institutional life of a scholarly field, the collective nature of any learned enterprise: these, to say nothing of economic and social circumstances, tend to diminish the effects of the individual scholar's production. A field like Orientalism has a cumulative and corporate identity, one that is particularly strong given its associations with traditional learning (the classics, the Bible, philology), public institutions (governments, trading companies, geographical societies, universities), and generically determined writing (travel books, books of exploration, fantasy, exotic description). The result for Orientalism has been a sort of consensus: certain things, certain types of statement, certain types of work have seemed for the Orientalist correct. He has built his work and research upon them, and they in tum have pressed hard upon new writers and scholars. Orientalism can thus be regarded as a manner of regularized (or Orientalized) writing, vision, and study, dominated by imperatives, perspectives, and ideological biases ostensibly suited to the Orient. The Orient is taught, researched, administered, and pronounced upon in certain discrete ways. (202)
Artistic forms, language idioms, conventional wisdoms about the Orient—all these illusions which pretended to be truth and which were reproduced as truths. “It is therefore correct that every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was consequently a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric.” (204)
He then differentiates between two different modes of knowing and representing the Orient:
The distinction I am making is really between an almost unconscious (and certainly an untouchable) positivity, which I shall call latent Orientalism, and the various stated views about Oriental society, languages, literatures, history, sociology, and so forth, which I shall call manifest Orientalism. Whatever change occurs in knowledge of the Orient is found almost exclusively in manifest Orientalism; the unanimity, stability, and durability of latent Orientalism are more or less constant. (206)
Said discusses the colonial effort of European powers in the second half of the 19th century as it drew on symbolic resources provided by the Orientalism to claim the national support for the British and French imperial presence in “undeveloped” lands. Regarding how the Orient was supposed to be divided between the European Powers, he writes:
What matters more immediately is the peculiar epistemological framework through which the Orient was seen, and out of which the Powers acted. For despite their differences, the British and the French saw the Orient as a geographical-and cultural, political, demographical, sociological, and historical-entity over whose destiny they believed themselves to have traditional entitlement. The Orient to them was no sudden discovery, no mere historical accident, but an area to the east of Europe whose principal worth was uniformly defined in terms of Europe, more particularly in tenos specifically claiming for Europe-European science, scholarship, understanding, and administration-the credit for having made the Orient what it was now. And this had been the achievement-inadvertent or not is beside the point-of modern Orientalism. (221)
Apart from institutionalized knowledge (“disseminative capacities of modem learning, its diffusive apparatus in the learned professions, the universities, the professional societies, the explorational and geographical organizations, the publishing industry” – p. 221), there was another method of knowing and managing the Orient in the West which was widely employed in the colonial struggle for the Oriental lands:
The second method by which Orientalism delivered the Orient to the West was the result of an important convergence. For decades the Orientalists had spoken about the Orient, they had translated texts, they had explained civilizations, religions, dynasties, cultures, mentalities-as academic objects, screened off from Europe by virtue of their inimitable foreignness… The Orienlalist remained outside the Orient, which, however much it was made to appear intelligible, remained beyond the Occident. This cultural, temporal, and geographical distance was expressed in metaphors of depth, secrecy, and sexual promise… Yet the distance between Orient and Occident was, almost paradoxically, in the process of being reduced throughout the nineteenth century. As the commercial, political, and other existential encounters between East and West increased, a tension developed between the dogmas of latent Orientalism, with its support in studies of the "classical" Orient, and the descriptions of a present, modern, manifest Orient Orientalism now articulated by travelers, pilgrims, statesmen, and the like. At some moment impossible to determine precisely, the tension caused a convergence of the two types of Orientalism. (221-222)
The convergence was the figure of an imperial spy, who possessed “intimate and expert knowledge of the Orient and of Orientals,” and yet served the interests of the European Powers in their quest for the Orient. (224)
2. Style, Expertise, Vision: Orientalism’s Worldliness
Said starts by discussing Kipling’s White Man as a cultural phenomenon aimed to mobilize the British society for the imperial effort.
Being a White Man was therefore an idea and a reality. It involved a reasoned position towards both the white and the non-white worlds. It meant-in the colonies-speaking in a certain way, behaving according to a code of regulations, and even feeling certain things and not others. It meant specific judgments, evaluations, gestures. It was a form of authority before which nonwhites, and even whites themselves, were expected to bend. In the institutional forms it took (colonial governments, consular corps, commercial establishments) it was an agency for the expression, diffusion, and implementation of policy towards the world, and within this agency, although a certain personal latitude was allowed, the impersonal communal idea of being a White Man ruled. Being a White Man, in short, was a very concrete manner of being-in-theworld, a way of taking hold of reality, language, and thought. It made a specific style possible. (227)
This image was based on the opposition “we” and “they”: “This opposition was reinforced not only by anthropology, linguistics, and history but also, of course, by the Darwinian theses on survival and natural selection, and-no less decisive-by the rhetoric of high cultural humanism.” (227)
In literary narratives, this opposition revealed by regular moralizations and judgements on the nature of the superiority of Europeans over Orientals. Consequently, Orientals in these narratives were downgraded to literary characters constructed according to the laws of the genre, not on the basis of “reality.” To exercise of this opposition, a special vocabulary and epistemological instruments were elaborated, which were facilitated by “method, tradition and politics all working together.” (230)
The scholarly investigator took a type marked "Oriental" for the same thing as any individual Oriental he might encounter. Years of tradition had encrusted discourse about such matters as the Semitic or Oriental spirit with some legitimacy. And political good sense taught, in Bell's marvelous phrase, that in the East "it all hangs together." Primitiveness therefore inhered in the Orient, was the Orient, an idea to which anyone dealing with or writing about the Orient had to return, as if to a touchstone outlasting time or experience. (230-231)
Ancient cultural bias was strengthened in the 19th century by the influential racial theory:
in late-nineteenth-century culture, as Lionel Trilling has said, "racial theory, stimulated by a rising nationalism and a spreading imperialism, supported by an incomplete and mal-assimilated science, was almost undisputed." (232)
He then analyzes in more detail the writing about the Orient at the turn of the 20th century, seeing how features described in the previous chapters reveal themselves there.
A new dialectic emerges out of this project. What is required of the Oriental expert is no longer simply "understanding"; now the Orient must be made to perform, its power must be enlisted on the side of "our" values, civilization, interests, goals. Knowledge of the Orient is (directly translated into activity, and the results give rise to new currents of thought and action in the Orient. (238)
This led to a split within Orientalism between its older and new versions: between a passive knowledge and knowledge as action, between vision and narrative:
Against this static system of "synchronic essentialism" I have caned vision because it presumes that the whole Orient can be seen panoptically, there is a constant pressure. The source of pressure is narrative, in that if any Oriental detail can be shown to move, or to develop, diachrony is introduced into the system. What seemed stable-and the Orient is synonymous with stability and unchanging eternality-now appears unstable. Instability suggests that history, with its disruptive detail, its currents of change, its tendency towards growth, decline, or dramatic movement, is possible in the Orient and for the Orient. History and the narrative by which history is represented argue that vision is insufficient, that "the Orient" as an unconditional ontological category does an injustice to the potential of reality for change. Moreover, narrative is the specific form taken by written history to counter the pennanence of vision. Lane <an early Orientalist> sensed the dangers of narrative when he refused to give linear shape to himself and to his information, preferring instead the monumental form of encyclopedic or lexicographical vision. Narrative asserts the power of men to be born, develop, and die, the tendency of institutions and actualities to change, the likelihood that modernity and contemporaneity will finally overtake "classical" civilizations; above all, it asserts that the domination of reality by vision is no more than a will to power, a will to truth and interpretation, and not an objective condition of history. Narrative, in short, introduces an opposing point of view, perspective, consciousness to the unitary web of vision… When as a result of World War 1 the Orient was made to enter history, it was the Orientalist-as-agent who did the work. (240)
Yet after the World War I, the domination of Europe over the Orient becomes less firm, which causes changes in the symbolic structures of Orientalism:
In the period between the wars, as we can easily judge from, say, Malraux's novels, the relations between East and West assumed a currency that was both widespread and anxious. The signs of Oriental claims for political independence were everywhere; certainly in the dismembered Ottoman Empire they were encouraged by the Allies and, as is perfectly evident in the whole Arab Revolt and its aftermath, quickly became problematic. The Orient now appeared to constitute a challenge, not just to the West in general, but to the West's spirit, knowledge, and
imperium. (248)
This led to some fears that the Orient might at some point get an upper hand over Europe, unless the latter mobilizes herself:
Europe's effort therefore was to maintain itself as what Valery called "une machine puissante," absorbing what it could from outside Europe, converting everything to its use, intellectually and materially, keeping the Orient selectively organized (or disorganized). Yet this could be done only through clarity of vision and analysis. Unless the Orient was seen for what it was, its power-military, material, spiritual-would sooner or later overwhelm Europe. The great colonial empires, great systems of systematic repression, existed to fend off the feared eventuality. Colonial subjects, as George Orwell saw them in Marrakech in 1939, must not be seen except as a kind of continental emanation, African, Asian, Oriental… (251)
This led to increased racist propaganda, such as “that the Orientals' bodies are lazy, that the Orient has no conception of history, of the nation, or of patrie, that the Orient is essentially mystical-and so on.” (253)
3. Modern Anglo-French Orientalism in Fullest Flower
In the interwar period, the firm standing of Orientalism in the Westerrn society is gradually undermined, mostly by externally (economic and political) factors:
No longer did it go without much controversy that Europe's domination over the Orient was almost a fact of nature; nor was it assumed that the Orient was in need of Western enlightenment. What mattered during the interwar years was a cultural self-definition that transcended the provincial and the xenophobic. For Gibb, the West has need of the Orient as something to be studied because it releases the spirit from sterile specialization, it eases the affliction of excessive parochial and nationalistic self-centeredness, it increases one's grasp of the really central issues in the study of culture. If the Orient appears more a partner in this new rising dialectic of cultural self-consciousness, it is, first, because the Orient is more of a challenge now than it was before, and second, because the West is entering a relatively new phase of cultural crisis, caused in part by the diminishment of Western suzerainty over the rest of the world. (257)
There is also a growth of non-Orientalist philosophies in Europe (Weber, e.g.) which challenge the ontological and gnoseological foundations of Orientalism. Yet, Said concentrates on another phenomenon, the growth of Islamic Orientalism, i.e. an Orientalist development which claimed that it was Islam that was the root of all evils about the Orient. Said then studies the careers and evolution of views of two prominent Islamic Orientalists, H. A. R. Gibb's and Louis Massignon.
As for the latter,
At its best, Massignon's vision of the East-West encounter assigned great responsibility to the West for its invasion of the East, its colonialism, its relentless attacks on Islam. Massignon was a tireless fighter on behalf of Muslim civilization and, as his numerous essays and letters after 1948 testify, in support of Palestinian refugees, in the defense of Arab Muslim and Christian rights in Palestine against Zionism, against what, with reference to something said by Abba Eban, he scathingly called Israeli "bourgeois colonialism." Yet the framework in which Massignon's vision was held also assigned the Islamic Orient to an essentially ancient time and the West to modernity. Like Robertson Smith, Massignon considered the Oriental to be not a modern man but a Semite; this reductive category had a powerful grip on his thought. (270)
Therefore, according to Massignon,
the Oriental, en soi, was incapable of appreciating or understanding himself. Partly because of what Europe had done to him, he had lost his religion and his philosophie; Muslims had "un vide immense" within them; they were close to anarchy and suicide. It became France's obligation, then, to associate itself with the Muslims' desire to defend their traditional culture, the rule of their dynastic life, and the patrimony of believers. (271)
Said then looks at Gibb “as the culmination of a specific academic tradition, what-to use an expression that does not occur in Polk's prose-we can call an academic-research consensus or paradigm.” (274-275) Gibb was an “insider” of the Western academia, therefore, “The Orient for Gibb was not a place one encountered directly; it was something one read about, studied, wrote about within the confines of learned societies, the university, the scholarly conference.” (275) For Gibbs, Islam is, too, the dominant structure organizing the entire life of Near Eastern communities.
In general, although “the old Orientalism was broken into many parts; yet all of them still served the traditional Orientalist dogmas.” (284)
4. The Latest Phase
In this section, Said focuses on the Orientalist influences in the American culture, academia and politics. He starts by considering cultural stereotypes about Arabs, which were strengthened by the confrontation of Arab states with Israel and with the use of oil as a lever of pressure. “In the films and television the Arab is associated either with lechery or bloodthirsty dishonesty.” (286) Another example: “A survey entitled The Arabs in American Tex/books reveals the most astonishing misinformation, or rather the most callous representations of an ethnic-religious group.” (287)
As for academia, “These crude ideas are supported, not contradicted, by the academic whose business is the study of the Arab Near East.” (288) Moreover, Oriental studies became even more about propaganda since the West was not involved into the confrontation with the Soviet Union.
In general, Said claims that the United States intentionally occupied space freed by the retreating British and French Empires in the Near East, and in the course of doing that they Orientalized this field
(a) the extent to which the European tradition of Orientalist scholarship was, if not taken over, then accommodated, normalized, domesticated, and popularized and fed into the postwar efflorescence of Near Eastern studies in the United States; and (b) the extent to which the European tradition has given rise in the United States to a coherent attitude among most scholars, institutions, styles of discourse, and orientations, despite the contemporary appearance of refinement, as well as the use of (again) highly sophisticated-appearing social-science techniques. (295-296)
Consequently, even now, at the time of Said’s writing, academic writing about Islam was quite dogmatic:
But the principal dogmas of Orientalism exist in their purest form today in studies of the Arabs and Islam. Let us recapitulate them here: one is the absolute and systematic difference between the West, which is rational, developed, humane, superior, and the Orient, which is aberrant. undeveloped, inferior. Another dogma is that abstractions about the Orient, particularly those based on texts representing a "classical" Oriental civilization, are always preferable to direct evidence drawn from modern Oriental realities. A third dogma is that the Orient is eternal, uniform, and incapable of defining itself; therefore it is assumed that a highly generalized and systematic vocabulary for describing the Orient from a Western standpoint is inevitable and even scientifically "objective." A fourth dogma is that the Orient is at bottom something either to be feared (the Yellow Peril, the Mongol hordes, the brown dominions) or to be controlled (by pacification, research and development, outright occupation whenever possible) . (300-301)
As an example of contemporary Orientalism, Said discusses the “intellectual failure” of The Cambridge History of Islam. He then looks at the racial politics of Israel, which to a considerable degree break the rights of Palestinians on the basis that they are “less developed” than Jews.
Said then analyzes the contemporary right wing discourse, which is a priori anti-Oriental due to its inherent Orientalism: “And so it is throughout the work of the contemporary Orientalist; assertions of the most bizarre sort dot his or her pages, whether it is a Manfred Halpern arguing that even though all human thought processes can be reduced to eight, the Islamic mind is capable of only four, or a Morroe Berger presuming that since the Arabic language is much given to rhetoric Arabs are consequently incapable of true thought. (310) However, here in this chapter, as well as in the previous one, his analysis becomes somewhat weaker than before, as he generalizes less and the details overwhelm the picture. Perhaps, this is because the contemporary criticism is too personal.
Said finishes this section, this chapter and the whole book by considering the role that Orientalism and its expert play in the foreign policy of the United States. As the latter became heavily invested in the Middle East,
Most of this investment, appropriately enough, is built on foundations of sand, since the experts instruct policy on the basis of such marketable abstractions as political elites, modernization and stability, most of which are simply the old Orientalist stereotypes dressed up in policy jargon, and most of which have been completely inadequate to describe what took place recently in Lebanon or earlier in Palestinian popular resistance to Israel. (321)
Said concludes that the current situation is the triumph of Orientalism, to the degree that even Orientals themselves start to speak the languages of Orientalism. Yet there is hope: in the critical thinking in modern universities. Sort of.
Positively. I do believe-and in my other work have tried to show -that enough is being done today in the human sciences to provide the contemporary scholar with insights, methods, and ideas that could dispense with racial, ideological, and imperialist stereotypes of the sort provided during its historical ascendancy by Orientalism. (328)
