There are many different kinds ofPalestinian experience,
which cannot all be assembled into one. One would therefore
have to write parallel histories ofthe communities in
Lebanon, the occupied territories, and so on. That is the
central problem. It is almost impossible to imagine a single
narrative: it would have to be the kind ofcrazy history that
comes out in Midnight's Children, with all those little strands
coming in and out.
-EDWARD SAID, "ON PALESTINIAN IDENTITY,
A CONVERSATION WITH SALMAN RUSHDlE"
II. On Orientalism
IN 1939 Aime Cesaire published his searing long poem "Cahier d'un
retour au pays natal." In it he wrote of his native Martinique, of colonial
oppression, of rediscovered African sources; he coined the term negritude.
His poem was written in the language of Lautreamont and Rimbaud,
but it was a French spattered with neologisms, punctuated by new
rhythms. For Cesaire a "native land" was something complex and hybrid,
salvaged from a lost origin, constructed out of a squalid present, articulated
within and against a colonial tongue.
By the early 1950s the negritude movement was in full swing, thrusting
an alternative humanism back at Europe; and in this new context it
became possible to question European ideological practices in radical
ways. Michel Leiris, who was a friend and collaborator of Cesaire's,
composed the first extended analysis of the relationship between anthropological
knowledge and colonialism (Leiris 1950). His discourse
opened a debate that has continued, with varying degrees of intensity,
during the subsequent decades. How has European knowledge about the
rest of the planet been shaped by a Western will to power? How have
Western writers, both imaginative and scientific, been enmeshed in co-
255
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256 HISTORIES
lonial and neocolonial situations? How, concretely, have they ignored,
resisted, and acquiesced in these enduring conditions of inequality?
Leiris pointed to a basic imbalance. Westerners had for centuries studied
and spoken for the rest of the world; the reverse had not been the case.
He announced a new situation, one in which the "objects" of observation
would begin to write back. The Western gaze would be met and scattered.
Since 1950 Asians, Africans, Arab orientals, Pacific islanders, and
Native Americans have in a variety of ways asserted their independence
from Western cultural and political hegemony and established a new
multivocal field of intercultural discourse. What will be the long-term
consequences of such a situation-if it endures? How has it already altered
what one can know about others, the ways such knowledge may
be formulated? It is still early to judge the depth and extent of the epistemological
changes that may be under way. (The literature on anthropology
and colonialism is quite large. A few important works are Maquet
1964; Hymes 1969; Asad 1973; Firth 1977; Copans 1974,1975; Leclerc
1972; and Nash 1975. In the field of Oriental and Islamic studies see
Tibawi 1963; Abdel-Malek 1963; Hourani 1967; and Khatibi 1976.)
Edward Said's Orienta/ism (1978a), a critical study of Western knowledge
about the exotic, occupies this indeterminate historical context. If it presents
itself as part of the general "writing back" against the West that
Leiris announced, Orienta/ism's predicament is an ambiguous one that
should be seen not in terms of a simple anti-imperialism but rather as a
symptom of the uncertainties generated by the new global situation. It is
important to situate Said's book within this wide perspective, for it would
be all too easy to dismiss Orientalism as a narrow polemic dominated by
immediate ideological goals in the Middle East struggle. It could be seen
too as merely the personal protest of a Palestinian deprived of his homeland
by a "uniquely punishing destiny," suffering from his externally imposed,
abstract identity as "an Oriental," oppressed by "an almost unanimous
consensus that politically he does not exist" (pp. 26-27). Indeed
Said writes forthrightly and eloquently of this, his own predicament; and
he writes also from a conviction that "pure" scholarship does not exist.
Knowledge in his view is inextricably tied to power. When it becomes
institutionalized, culturally accumulated, overly restrictive in its definitions,
it must be actively opposed by a counterknowledge. Orienta/ism
is polemical, its analysis corrosive; but Said's book operates in a number
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ON ORIENTALISM 257
of registers, and it would be wrong to restrict its significance unduly.
Orientalism is at once a serious exercise in textual criticism and, most
fundamentally, a series of important if tentative epistemological reflections
on general styles and procedures of cultural discourse.
Said's topic is usually thought of as a rather old-fashioned scholarly
discipline allied with nineteenth-century philology and concerned with
the collection and analysis of texts in Eastern languages. Raymond
Schwab's encyclopedic Renaissance orientale (1950) is of course the
classic history of this ensemble, which included Sinologists, Islamicists,
Indo-Europeanists, literati, travelers, and an eclectic host of aficionados.
Said does not attempt to revise or extend Schwab's work, for his approach
is not historicist or empirical but deductive and constructivist. His
study undertakes a simultaneous expansion and formalization of the
field, transforming Orientalism into a synecdoche for a much more complex
and ramified totality. Said calls this totality a "discourse," following
Foucault. I shall discuss Said's adoption of a Foucauldian methodology
and its hazards. For the moment, though, it is enough to say that the
Orientalist "discourse" is characterized by an oppressive systematicity, a
"sheer knitted-together strength" (p. 6) that Said sets out to reveal through
a reading of representative texts and experiences.
Although Said discovers "Orientalism" in Homer, Aeschylus, the
Chanson de Roland, and Dante, he situates its modern origins in Barthelemy
d'Herblot's Bibliotheque orientale. This compendium of oriental
knowledge is criticized by Said for its cosmological scope and for its
construction as a "systematic" and "rational" oriental panorama. It is significant
that Said's reading of Herblot's seventeenth-century work makes
no attempt to analyze it as Foucault would in Les mots et les chosesthat
is, "archaeologically"-in relation to a synchronic epistemological
field. The approach of Orientalism is thus clearly indicated as genealogical.
Its central task is to describe retrospectively and continuously the
structures of an Orientalism that achieved its classical form in the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries. Said's two criticisms of Herblot are
constitutive of his object: Orientalism is always too broadly and abstractly
pitched, and it is always overly systematic.
Said proceeds to apply these reproaches, with varying degrees of
plausibility, to a diverse range of authors, institutions, and typical experiences.
There are analyses of Sylvestre de Sacy, Ernest Renan and the
Napoleonic expedition to Egypt's scholarly product, the massive Description
de l'Egypte. The speeches of politicians such as Balfour and
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258 HISTORIES
Cromer (juxtaposed with Henry Kissinger); the Indian journalism of
Marx; the oriental voyages of Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Nerval, and
Flaubert; the adventures of Burton and Lawrence; the scholarship of
H. A. R. Gibb and Louis Massignon are all woven into an intertextual
unity. This ensemble-though it leaves some room for historical mutation,
different national traditions, personal idiosyncrasies, and the genius
of "great" writers-is designed to emphasize the systematic and invariant
nature of the Orientalist discourse. There is no way to summarize the
complex interweavings of Said's critical method-associative, sometimes
brilliant, sometimes forced, and in the end numbingly repetitive. It
succeeds at least in isolating and discrediting an array of "oriental"
stereotypes: the eternal and unchanging East, the sexually insatiable
Arab, the "feminine" exotic, the teeming marketplace, corrupt despotism,
mystical religiosity. Said is particularly effective in his critical analysis
of Orientalist "authority"-the paternalist privileges unhesitatingly
assumed by Western writers who "speak for" a mute Orient or reconstitute
its decayed or dismembered "truth," who lament the passing of its
authenticity, and who know more than its mere natives ever can. This
methodical suspicion of the reconstitutive procedures of writing about
others could be usefully extended beyond Orientalism to anthropological
practice generally.
If Orientalism, as Said describes it, has a structure, this resides in its
tendency to dichotomize the human continuum into we-they contrasts
and to essentia/ize the resultant "other"-to speak of the oriental mind,
for example, or even to generalize about "Islam" or "the Arabs." All of
these Orientalist "visions" and "textualizations," as Said terms them,
function to suppress an authentic "human" reality. This reality, he implies,
is rooted in oral encounter and reciprocal speech, as opposed to
the processes of writing or of the visual imagination. Said's limited polemical
goal is well served by such an analysis. "Authentic" human encounter
can be portrayed as subjugated to the dead book. (Flaubert does
not, for example, really experience Egypt as much as he recopies a passage
from earlier "voyages to the East.") The theoretical issues raised by
Orienta/ism as a case study of a cultural discourse cannot be disposed
of, however, by means of any simple contrast between experience and
textual ity.
Said is not a simple polemicist. His critical approach is restless and
mordant, repeatedly pushing its analyses to epistemological limits. Behind
the immediate influence of Foucault lies an ambivalent admiration
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ON ORIENTALISM 259
for Nietzsche. At various moments in his book Said is led to argue that
all cultural definitions must be restrictive, that all knowledge is both
powerful and fictional, that all language distorts. He suggests that "authenticity,"
"experience," "reality," "presence" are mere rhetorical conventions.
The general influence of the French theory that Said has done
so much to interpret for American readers is here most apparent (see
particularly his "Abcdarium Culturae" in Said 1975:277-344). While he
cites Levi-Strauss and Barthes as well as Foucault, at the same time Said
makes frequent appeals to an old-fashioned existential realism. In the
multivocal world situation I have outlined this sort of uncertainty is crucial.
Should criticism work to counter sets of culturally produced images
such as those of Orientalism with more "authentic" or more "human"
representations? Or if criticism must struggle against the procedures of
representation itself, how is it to begin? How, for example, is an oppositional
critique of Orientalism to avoid falling into "Occidentalism"?
These are fundamental issues-inseparably political and epistemological-raised
by Said's work.
Said never defines Orientalism but rather qualifies and designates it from
a variety of distinct and not always compatible standpoints. The book
begins by postulating three loose "meanings" of Orientalism, "historical
generalizations" that comprise the "backbone" of his subsequent analyses.
First, Orientalism is what Orientalists do and have done. An Orientalist
is "anyone who teaches, writes about, or researches the Orient ...
either in its specific or its general aspects." Included in this group are
academics and government experts: philologists, sociologists, historians,
and anthropologists. Second, Orientalism is a "style of thought based
upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between 'the
Orient' and (most of the time) 'the Occident'" (p. 2). Any writing, Said
goes on to suggest, at any period in the history of the Occident that accepts
as its starting point a basic dichotomy between East and West and
that makes essentialist statements about "the Orient, its people, customs,
'mind,' destiny, and so on" is Orientalist. Finally, Orientalism is a "corporate
institution for dealing with the Orient," which, during the colonial
period following roughly the late eighteenth century wields the power of
"dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient" (p. 3).
This third designation, unlike the other two, is pitched at a rigorously
transindividual, cultural level and suggests "an enormously systematic"
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260 HISTORIES
mechanism capable of organizing and largely determining whatever may
be said or written about the Orient.
One notices immediately that in the first and third of Said's "meanings"
Orientalism is concerned with something called the Orient, while
in the second the Orient exists merely as the construct of a questionable
mental operation. This ambivalence, which sometimes becomes a confusion,
informs much of Said's argument. Frequently he suggests that a
text or tradition distorts, dominates, or ignores some real or authentic
feature of the Orient. Elsewhere, however, he denies the existence of any
"real Orient," and in this he is more rigorously faithful to Foucault and
the other radical critics of representation whom he cites. Indeed the absence
of anything more than a brief allusion to the "brute reality" of the
"cultures and nations whose location is in the East ... their lives, histories
and customs" represents a significant methodological choice on his
part. Orientalist inauthenticity is not answered by any authenticity. Yet
Said's concept of a "discourse" still vacillates between, on the one hand,
the status of an ideological distortion of lives and cultures that are never
concretized and, on the other, the condition of a persistent structure of
signifiers that, like some extreme example of experimental writing, refers
solely and endlessly to itself. Said is thus forced to rely on nearly tautological
statements, such as his frequent comment that Orientalist discourse
"orientalizes the Orient," or on rather unhelpful specifications
such as: "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"
(p.202).
If redundancy haunts Said's account, this is not, I think, merely the
result of a hermeneutical short circuit in which the critic discovers in his
topic what he has already put there. Nor is it simply an effect of his
insistence on the sheer knitted-togetherness of a textual unity that is constantly
in danger of decomposing into its discontinuous functions, authors,
institutions, histories, and epistemologically distinct epochs. Beyond
these problems (faced by any interpreter of constructed, complex
cultural ensembles) lies a substantial and disquieting set of questions
about the ways in which distinct groups of humanity (however defined)
imagine, describe, and comprehend each other. Are such discourses ultimately
condemned to redundancy, the prisoners of their own authoritative
images and linguistic protocols? Orientalism-"enormously systematic,"
cosmological in scope, incestuously self-referential-emerges
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ON ORIENTALISM 261
as much more than a mere intellectual or even ideological tradition. Said
at one point calls it "a considerable dimension of modern politicalintellectual
culture." As such it "has less to do with the Orient than it
does with 'our' world" (p. 12).
The quotation marks placed by Said around our may be understood
to have generated his entire study. The reasons for this are not simply
personal but lead us to what Said rightly identifies as "the main intellectual
issue raised by Orientalism. Can one divide human reality, as indeed
human reality seems to be genuinely divided, into clearly different cultures,
histories, traditions, societies, even races, and survive the consequences
humanly?" (p. 45). The result of such distinctions, he argues, is
to create invidious and imperially useful oppositions that serve to "Iimit
the human encounter between different cultures, traditions, and societies"
(p. 46). (It is worth noting in passing that we-they distinctions of
the kind Said condemns are also useful to anti-imperialism and national
liberation movements.) The key theoretical issue raised by Orientalism
concerns the status of all forms of thought and representation for dealing
with the alien. Can one ultimately escape procedures of dichotomizing, .
restructuring, and textualizing in the making of interpretive statements
about foreign cultures and traditions? If so, how? Said frankly admits that
alternatives to orientalism are not his subject. He merely attacks the discourse
from a variety of positions, and as a result his own standpoint is
not sharply defined or logically grounded. Sometimes his analysis flirts
with a critique of representation as such; but the most constant position
from which it attacks Orientalism is a familiar set of values associated
with the Western anthropological human sciences-existential standards
of "human encounter" and vague recommendations of "personal, authentic,
sympathetic, humanistic knowledge" (p. 197).
In Said's discussion of the Orientalist as humanist these assumptions
are thrown into sharp relief. There has, of course, been a sympathetic,
nonreductive Orientalist tradition, a strand that Said downplays. He
does, however, on one occasion grapple with this "good" Orientalism in
the person of its most representative figure, Louis Massignon. Massignon
must stand for those Orientalists-one thinks of scholars such as Sylvain
Levi, Marcel Mauss, Henry Corbin-whose involvement with the foreign
traditions they studied evolved into a deep personal and dialogical quest
for comprehension. Such writers have characteristically presented themselves
as spokesmen for oriental or primitive "wisdom" and also as democratic
reformers and humanist critics of imperialism.
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262 HISTORIES
Said's discussion of Massignon, the most interesting in his book, is a
crucial test case for the theory of Oriental ism as a pervasive and coercive
cultural discourse. Here Said can no longer generalize sweepingly and
categorically about "the Orientalist" and "Orientalism." (Indeed his critical
manner sometimes appears to mimic the essentializing discourse it
attacks.) Said gives full and generous recognition to Massignon's profound
empathy with Islamic mysticism, to his subtlety and range of
expression, and to his political commitment on behalf of exploited orientals;
but he argues that the great scholar's work is still finally defined
within a restricted "discursive consistency." He deploys his most Nietzschean
arguments to the effect that any representation must be "implicated,
intertwined, embedded, interwoven with a great many other
things besides the 'truth,' which is itself a representation" (p. 272).
Said shows rather effectively the limits of Massignon's intellectual
world. The most important of these is the scholar's tendency to perceive
present Middle Eastern realities with reference to traditionally defined
cultural or spiritual values. Massignon saw the earthbound experiences
of colonialism, economic oppression, love, death, and so on through the
"dehumanized lens" of a quasi-metaphysical conception of Semitic essence.
He perceived the Palestinian conflict, for example, in terms of the
quarrel between Isaac and Ishmael. Here as elsewhere Said makes short
work of appeals beyond a corrupt present to an authentic tradition. Such
appeals, however· sympathetic, are always suspect in their disparagement
of current processes of cultural and political invention. Ultimately
Massignon could not avoid participation in a "will to knowledge over the
Orient and on its behalf" (p. 272).
If even a "genius" such as Massignon can be so restricted, it becomes
difficult to escape the bleak though rigorous conclusion that all
human expression is ultimately determined by cultural "archives," and
that global truth must be the result of a battle of "discursive formations"
in which the strongest prevails. Said is uneasy with so Foucauldian a
conclusion. He goes on to reassert a transcendent humanist standard,
rescuing Massignon, who is after all "a very human being" from an institutional
determination now qualified as only a "dimension" of his "productive
capacity." Massignon does in the end rise above his culture into
a "broader history and anthropology." Massignon's statement "nous
sommes tous des Semites" shows, according to Said, "the extent to which
his ideas about the Orient could transcend the local anecdotal circumstances
of a Frenchman and of French society" (p. 274). A very human
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ON ORIENTALISM 263
being becomes a humanist. But the privilege of standing above cultural
particularism, of aspiring to the universalist power that speaks for humanity,
for the universal experiences of love, work, death, and so on, is
a privilege invented by a totalizing Western liberalism. This benevolent
comprehension of the visions produced by mere "local anecdotal circumstances"
is an authority that escapes Said's criticism.
Said sometimes presents his critical posture as "oppositional" (p.
326), a stance of open attack on imperial power and knowledge (see Said
1976, 1979). More frequently, though, he qualifies himself positively as
a humanist. This stance seems to presuppose a particularist, even individualist
attitude combined with cosmopolitanism and a general valorization
of creative process. For example T. E. Lawrence is taken to task
for writing (in a rather admirably self-conscious passage) of "Arabs"
rather than of "individual Arabs with narratable life histories" (p. 229).
Such general statements, Said argues, "necessarily subordinate" an Arab's
specific feeling of joy, of sadness, of injustice in the face of tyranny,
and so on. Said castigates Orientalism for its construction of static images
rather than historical or personal "narratives." The "human experience,"
whether that of the individual Orientalist or of his or her objects of study,
is flattened into an asserted authority on one side and a generalization
on the other. Said characterizes the human realities thus elided with quotations
from Yeats-'I/the uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor,' in
which all humans live," and "the foul rag and bone shop of the heart"
(pp. 230, 110).
It is still an open question, of course, whether an African pastoralist
shares the same existential "bestial floor" with an Irish poet and his readers.
And it is a general feature of humanist common denominators that
they are meaningless, since they bypass the local cultural codes that
make personal experience articulate. Said's resort to such notions underlines
the absence in his book of any developed theory of culture as a
differentiating and expressive ensemble rather than as simply hegemonic
and disciplinary. His basic values are cosmopolitan. He approves as an
alternative to Orientalism the cultural hermeneutics of Erich Auerbach,
Ernst Robert Curtius, and Clifford Geertz. He appears to endorse the anthropological
commonplace that "the more one is able to leave one's
cultural home, the more easily is one able to judge it, and the whole
world as well, with the spiritual detachment and generosity necessary for
true vision" (p. 259). The anthropologist as outsider and participantobserver
(existential shorthand for the hermeneutical circle) is a familiar
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264 HISTORIES
modern topos. Its wisdom-and authority-is expressed with a disturbing
beauty by Hugh of St. Victor (quoted by Said from Auerbach): "The
man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom
every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom
the entire world is as a foreign land" (p. 259).
Said's humanist perspectives do not harmonize with his use of methods
derived from Foucault, who is of course a radical critic of humanism. But
however wary and inconsistent its appeals, Orientalism is a pioneering
attempt to use Foucault systematically in an extended cultural analysis.
Its difficulties and successes should thus be of interest to historians, critics,
and anthropologists.
We have already encountered the central notion of discourse. For
Said a discourse is the cultural-political configuration of "the textual attitude"
(pp. 92-94). The most extreme example of this attitude is Don
Quixote; its condensed modern formulation is Flaubert's Dictionnaire
des idees rec;ues. People prefer order to disorder; they grasp at formulas
rather than actuality; they prefer the guidebook to the confusion before
them. "It seems a common human failing," Said writes, using the word
human with significant ambivalence, "to prefer the schematic authority
of a text to the disorientations of direct encounters with the human" (p.
93). In certain conditions this textual attitude hardens into a body of rigid
cultural definitions that determine what any individual can express about
a certain acutality. This "reality" coalesces as a field of representations
produced by the discourse. The conditions for discursive hardening are
not clearly defined by Said, but they appear to be related to an ongoing
imbalance of power that permits-perhaps obliges-a politically and
technologically stronger culture or group to define weaker groups. Thus
in Said's analysis occidental culture through the discourse of Orientalism
"suffused" the activity of orientals with "meaning, intelligibility, and reality."
The Orientalist discourse, which, according to Said, did not significantly
change after the late eighteenth century, generated a dumb
show of oriental images. "Actual human interchange between Oriental
and Westerner" (p. 95) was systematically repressed. Orientals had no
voice on the "Orientalist Stage."
Said's general attempt to extend Foucault's conception of a discourse
into the area of cultural constructions of the exotic is a promising one.
Foucault's overall undertaking has of course been scrupulously ethnoThis
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ON ORIENTALlSM 265
centric. In attempting to isolate the epistemological strata of European
thought he has avoided all comparative appeals to other worlds of meaning.
There are no evocations of pensee sauvage, of Hopi linguistic
categories, and the like. Foucault probably believes such appeals to be
methodologically dubious, and he contrasts Western civilization only
whimsically to Borges' "Chinese encyclopedia" at the outset of Les mots
et /es choses. Foucault is interested in the ways in which a given cultural
order constitutes itself by means of discursive definitions: sane-mad,
healthy-sick, legal-criminal, normal-perverse. The illicit categories for
Foucault exist not as areas of an outlaw freedom but as culturally produced,
arranged experiences.
Said extends Foucault's analysis to include ways in which a cultural
order is defined externally, with respect to exotic "others." In an imperialist
context definitions, representations, and textualizations of subject
peoples and places play the same constitutive role as "internal" representations
(for example of the criminal classes in nineteenth-century Europe)
and have the same consequences-discipline and confinement, both
physical and ideological. Therefore "the Orient," in Said's analysis, exists
uniquely for the Occident. His task in Orienta/ism is to dismantle the
discourse, to expose its oppressive system, to "clear the archive" of its
received ideas and static images.
Foucault is not easily imitated. His writing has been a series of experiments
and tactical interventions rather than a methodical program.
Said's appropriation of Foucault strikes a committed, moral note. Contrasting
(and preferring) Foucault to Derrida, Said notes that the latter's
"endless worrying of representation" from "within" canonical Western
texts does not permit critical attention to move beyond the written (however
"indecidable") to the social and political, to the institutions underlying
an imperial and hegemonic "Western thought." Foucault's brand of
criticism, unlike Derrida's, "reads" a prison or a hospital, a legal system,
or-as Said does in Orienta/ism-a geopolitical artifact such as De Lesseps'
canal (seen as an Orientalist inscription). "By virtue of Foucault's
criticism we are able to understand culture as a body of disciplines having
the effective force of knowledge linked systematically, but by no
means immediately, to power." Culture as Said conceives it is little more
than "a massive body of self-congratulating ideas" and of "disciplines"
that the critic must unmask and oppose without claiming-by virtue of a
system or sovereign method-to stand outside of "history, subjectivity, or
circumstance." "The critical consciousness ... having initially detached
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266 HISTORIES
itself from the dominant culture" thereafter adopts "a situated and responsible
adversary position" (Said 1978b:709, 690, 713).
It is rather difficult, however, to qualify Foucault's restless guerrilla
activity on behalf of the excluded, against all totalizing, defining, essentializing
alliances of knowledge and power as "situated and responsible."
Said himself deploys a rather loose collection of "adversary theoretical
models" derived from Foucault, Gramsci, Lukacs, Fanon, and others
(1979: 16). A key political term for Said is oppositional, and it is fairly
clear what this means in the limited context of a book such as Orientalism,
which "writes back" at an imperial discourse from the position of an
oriental whose actuality has been distorted and denied. More generally,
however, it is apparent that a wide range of Western humanist assumptions
escape Said's oppositional analysis, as do the discursive alliances
of knowledge and power produced by anticolonial and particularly nationalist
movements.
Beyond his overall stance as "oppositional" cultural critic Said makes use
of other Foucauldian approaches that should be discussed briefly. Most
significant is his adoption of the posture of critical retrospection that
Nietzsche called genealogy. In this Said is true to Foucault's later evolution
away from the methodology of layered "archaeological" discontinuity
exemplified in The Order of Things and The Archaeology of Knowledge
and towards a presentation of the lineages of the present, as
exemplified in Discipline and Punish and especially The History of Sexuality,
volume 1.
The field of Orientalism is genealogically distributed in two ways:
synchronically (constituting in a unified system all Western textual versions
of the Orient) and diachronically (plotting a single lineage of statements
about the East, running from Aeschylus to Renan to modern political
sociology and "area studies"). Like all genealogies Said's grows more
specific as it approaches the present it has been constructed to explain
and affect. Thus the bulk of his account describes the heyday of Orientalism
in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This is followed
by an attempt to generate meanings in the current Middle East situation
with reference to this classical tradition. The aim here is not, of course,
the one most usual in genealogies-a new legitimation of the presentbut
rather, as in Foucault's History of Sexuality and Madness and Civilization,
radical de-legitimation. A certain degree of anachronism is
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ON ORIENTALISM 267
openly embraced.1 Genealogy, like all historical description and analysis,
is constructive. It makes sense in the present by making sense selectively
out of the past. Its inclusions and exclusions, its narrative continuities,
its judgments of core and periphery are finally legitimated either
by convention or by the authority granted to or arrogated by the genealogist.
Genealogy is perhaps the most political of historical modes; but to
be effective it cannot appear too openly tendentious, and Said's genealogy
suffers on this score. To his credit he makes no secret of the restrictive
choices involved.
First, Said limits his attention almost exclusively to statements about
the Arab Middle East-omitting, regretfully but firmly, the Far East, India,
the Pacific, and North Africa. The omission of the Maghreb is crucial, for
it ensures that Said will not have to discuss modern French Orientalist
currents. In a French context the kinds of critical questions posed by Said
have been familiar since the Algerian war and may be found strongly
expressed well before 1950. It would simply not be possible to castigate
recent French "Orientalism" ill the way that he does the discourse of the
modern American Middle East "experts," which is still shaped by Cold
War patterns and by the polarized Arab-Israeli conflict.
Said's second genealogical limitation restricts the national traditions
under consideration to the British and French strands, with the addition
of a recent American offspring. He is obliged to rule out Italian, Spanish,
Russian, and especially German Orientalisms. The highly developed
nineteenth-century German tradition is cast as peripheral to French and
English pioneers but, more important, as not constituted like these two
in a close relationship with colonial occupation and domination of the
Orient (pp. 16-19). In effect, German Orientalism is too disinterested
and thus atypical of a genealogy that defines the discourse as essentially
colonialist. If Said's primary aim were to write an intellectual history of
Orientalism or a history of Western ideas of the Orient, his narrowing
and rather obviously tendentious shaping of the field could be taken as a
1. In Discipline and Punish (1975:35) Foucault writes of his intention to
produce a history of the prison: "Par un pur anachronisme? Non, si on entend
par Iii faire I'histoire du passe dans les termes du present. Oui, si on entend par
Iii faire I'historie du present" (p. 35). His fullest statement on genealogy is
"Nietzsche, Genealogy, History" (1977). This chapter discusses only those works
by Foucault that were available at the time of publication of Orientalism. I do
not consider his refinements and transgressions of historical method following
the first volume of History of Sexuality.
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268 HISTORIES
fatal flaw. But his undertaking is conceived otherwise and is openly an
oppositional genealogy. If Said's genealogy sometimes appears clumsily
rigged (the final all-too-predictable zeroing in on the Middle East and
abrupt jump from Continental to American "Orientalism" is the least convincing
of its "continuities"), one need not reject the entire critical para-
digm.
Said is perfectly correct to identify retrospectively a "discourse" that
dichotomizes and essentializes in its portrayal of others and that functions
in a complex but systematic way as an element of colonial domination.
It is important that this discourse be recognized wherever it exists;
but the discourse should not be closely identified with the specific
tradition of Orientalism. Its field of application has been far more general.
The problem with the book, at least from a theoretical standpoint,
is its title. In attempting to derive a "discourse" directly from a "tradition,"
Said abandons the level of cultural criticism proposed by Foucault and
relapses into traditional intellectual history. Moreover, in portraying the
discourse as based on essentially nineteenth-century modes of thought,
Said gives himself too easy a target. He does not question anthropological
orthodoxies based on a mythology of fieldwork encounter and a hermeneutically
minded cultural theory-orthodoxies he often appears to
share.
It is apparent that "discourse" analysis cannot safely be founded on
redefined "traditions." Nor can it be derived from a study of "authors."
The general tendency in modern textual studies has been to reduce the
occasion of a text's creation by an individual subject to merely one of its
generative or potentially meaningful contexts. While recognizing the importance
of this separation of the text from the work (Barthes: "The work
is held in the hand, the text in language"), Said has resisted radical structuralist
attacks on phenomenology and on the essential (beginning and
continuing) function of an authorial intention. Beginnings (1975), which
preceded OrientaJism, is a detailed and perspicuous meditation on this
set of issues. It is concerned precisely with the problem, experienced by
a wide range of modernist writers, of being an "author." Steering a complex
course between individualist conceptions of creativity on the one
hand and on the other reductions of "the moving force of life and behaviour,
the forma informans, intention" (p. 319) to an external system,
whether cultural or critical, Said suggests an intermediate analytical topos
that he calls a "career." The modern author's intention is not so much
to produce works as it is to begin (and to continue beginning) to write. A
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ON ORIENTALISM 269
career is the ensemble of these complex historically and culturally situated
intentions. It is always in process, always being begun in specific
situations, and never possessing either a stable essence or a shaped biographical
finality. The author is reconceived, and in the face of structuralist
dissolution rescued.
It is not surprising, then, that Said, in discussing Orientalism as a
discourse and a tradition, adopts what he calls a "hybrid perspective."
"Foucault believes that in general the individual text or author counts for
very little; empirically, in the case of Orientalism (and perhaps nowhere
else) I find this not to be so" (1978a:23). This doggedly empirical and
curiously qualified assertion separates Said sharply from Foucault. What
is important theoretically is not that Foucault's author counts for very
little but rather that a "discursive formation"-as opposed to ideas, citations,
influences, references, conventions, and the like-is not produced
by authorial subjects or even by a group of authors arranged as a "tradition."
This methodological (not empirical) point is important for anyone
involved in the kind of task Said is attempting. One cannot combine
within the same analytic totality both personal statements and discursive
statements, even though they may be lexically identical. Said's experiment
seems to show that when the analysis of authors and traditions is
intermixed with the analysis of discursive formations, the effect is a mutual
weakening.
None of the authors discussed in Orienta/ism is accorded a "career"
in the complex sense posited by Beginnings, but all are portrayed as instances
of Orientalist discourse. Unlike Foucault, however, for whom
authorial names function as mere labels for discursive statements, Said's
authors may be accorded psychohistorical typicality and are often made
through their texts to have representative Orientalist experiences. One
example among many, chosen for the familiarity of its subject, is Said's
reading of a passage from Marx-the end of his article "The British Rule
in India" (Said 1978a:153-157).
Marx denounces an affront to "human feeling"-the spectacle of
Indian social life brutally disrupted, "thrown into a sea of woes" by imperialism;
but he quickly reminds his readers that "these idyllic village
communities" have always been the foundation of "Oriental despotism."
They have "restrained the human mind within the smallest possible compass,
making it the unresisting tool of superstition, enslaving it beneath
the traditional rules, depriving it of all its grandeur and historical energies."
England, Marx goes on to say, is history's agent; its task is to "lay
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270 HISTORIES
the material foundations of Western Society in Asia." Said scents Oriental
ism in the reference to despotism and in a later citation of Goethe's
WestOst/icher Oiwan. He identifies a "romantic redemptive project,"
which assumes the general Western privilege of putting the Orient-stagnant,
dismembered, corrupt-back together. Marx is also convicted of
subsuming "individuals" and "existential human identities" under "artificial
entities" such as "Oriental," "Asiatic," "Semitic," or within collectives
such as "race," "mentality," and "nation."
Here an effective reading begins to get out of hand. It is unclear why
Said does not also convict Marx of subsuming individuals under the "artificial
entities" "class" and "history." Furthermore, if Marx's participation
in Orientalism derives from his inattention to existential, individual
cases, one wonders how social or cultural theory is ever to be "humanly"
built. In addition, it is well known that Marx heaped "Orientalist" scorn
and condescension upon the "idiocy of rural life" wherever he found it,
believing that such stagnant, repressive situations had to be violently
transformed before they could improve. Here Said skirts "unfairness" to
Marx. While legitimately isolating Orientalist aspects of the text, he too
quickly skims over its rhetorical intentions. Moreover, Said soon abandons
any discussion of Orientalist statements and goes on to uncover in
the text a typical Orientalist experience. Marx, we are told, at first expressed
"a natural human repugnance" toward the suffering of orientals;
he felt a "human sympathy," a "fellow feeling." This "personal human
experience" was then "censored" by a process of Orientalist labeling and
abstraction, "a wash of sentiment" was repressed by "unshakable definitions."
(Said writes in the past tense, as if this is what really happened
in Marx's mind.) "The vocabulary of emotion dissipated as it submitted
to the lexicographical police action of Orientalist science and even Orientalist
art. An experience was dislodged by a dictionary definition" (p.
155). By now Said could not be farther from Foucault's austere pages,
where all psychologizing is forbidden and where authors escape at least
having to go through such instructive "experiences." Said's descriptions
of Orientalist discourse are frequently sidetracked by humanist fables of
suppressed authenticity.
Discourse analysis is always in a sense unfair to authors. It is not
interested in what they have to say or feel as subjects but is concerned
merely with statements as related to other statements in a field. 2 Escaping
2. On the initial definition of this field, which he calls a "discursive formation,"
see Foucault's strictures in The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969: chap.
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ON ORIENTALISM 271
an impression of unfairness and reductionism in this kind of analysis is a
matter of methodological rigor and stylistic tact. Foucault, at least, does
not appear unfair to authors because he seldom appeals to any individual
intentionality or subjectivity. "Hybrid perspectives" such as Said's have
considerably more difficulty escaping reductionism.3
Indeed Said's methodological catholicity repeatedly blurs his analysis.
If he is advancing anthropological arguments, Orientalism appears
as the cultural quest for order. When he adopts the stance of a literary
critic, it emerges as the processes of writing, textualizing, and interpreting.
As an intellectual historian Said portrays Orientalism as a specific
series of influences and schools of thought. For the psychohistorian Orientalist
discourse becomes a representative series of personal-historical
experiences. For the Marxist critic of ideology and culture it is the expression
of definite political and economic power interests. Orientalism is
also at times conflated with Western positivism, with general definitions
of the primitive, with evolutionism, with racism. One could continue the
list. Said's discourse analysis does not itself escape the all-inclusive "Occidentalism"
he specifically rejects as an alternative to Orientalism
(p.328).
Though Said's work frequently relapses into the essentializing modes it
attacks and is ambivalently enmeshed in the totalizing habits of Western
humanism, it still succeeds in questioning a number of important anthropological
categories, most important, perhaps, the concept of culture. In
this final section I shall sketch out some of these issues, the most farreaching
questions raised by Orienta/ism.
The effect of Said's general argument is not so much to undermine
2). Foucault's method ignores "influences" and "traditions," demotes "authors,"
and holds in suspense any criteria of discursive unity based on the persistence or
commonality of "objects," "styles," "concepts," or "themes." It may be noted that
Said makes use of all these familiar elements from the history of ideas.
3. Said's critical approach can in fact be quite disturbing, especially when
he is uncovering Orientalism in lesser-known figures than Marx, among whom
the disjuncture between discursive statements and personal expressions is less
immediately apparent. A particularly blatant example may be seen in his use of
the great Sanskrit scholar and humanist Sylvain Levi in order to show the connection
of Orientalism with imperial politics (Said 1978:249-250). The misleading
image of someone intensely concerned with European "interests" in the Orient
(the word interest is inserted into Levi's discourse) is nowhere qualified. For
an affirmation that modern Orientalists have been far less reductive than Said
portrays them to be see Hourani 1979.
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272 HISTORIES
the notion of a substantial Orient as it is to make problematic "the Occident."
It is less common today than it once was to speak of "the East,"
but we still make casual reference to lithe West," "Western culture," and
so on. Even theorists of discontinuity and deconstruction such as Foucault
and Derrida continue to set their analyses within and against a
Western totality. Said shares their assumptions inasmuch as he portrays
the Western culture of which Orientalism is an exemplar as a discrete
entity capable of generating knowledge and institutional power over the
rest of the planet. Western order, seen this way, is imperial, unreciprocal,
aggressive, and potentially hegemonic. At times, though, Said permits us
to see the functioning of a more complex dialectic by means of which a
modern culture continuously constitutes itself through its ideological
constructs of the exotic. Seen in this way "the West" itself becomes a
play of projections, doublings, idealizations, and rejections of a complex,
shifting otherness. "The Orient" always plays the role of origin or
alter ego. For example Renan working in his "philological laboratory"
does not simply concoct the scholarly topos of the Semitic Orient but in
the same process produces a conception of what it means to be European
and modern (pp. 132, 146).
Here Said's argument reinforces Stanley Diamond's (1974) contentions
that Western culture can conceive of itself critically only with reference
to fictions of the primitive. To this dialectical view we may usefully
add the overall perspective of Marshall Hodgson's historical work,
which portrays "Europe" as, until the late eighteenth century, merely "a
fringe area of the Afro-Euroasian zone of agrarianate citied life" (see particularly
Hodgson 1974, 1963, and Burke 1979, an excellent survey of
Hodgson's complex work). If we adopt along with these perspectives a
generally structuralist suspicion of all quests for origins (the origins of the
West in Greece or in Christianity), we are left with a totality in process,
composed and recomposed in changing external relations.
When we speak today of the West, we are usually referring to a
force-technological, economic, political-no longer radiating in any
simple way from a discrete geographical or cultural center. This force, if
it may be spoken of in the singular, is disseminated in a diversity of forms
from multiple centers-now including Japan, Australia, the Soviet
Union, and China-and is articulated in a variety of "microsociological"
contexts (see Duvignaud 1973). It is too early to say
whether these processes of change will result in global cultural homogenization
or in a new order of diversity. The new may always look monoThis
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ON ORIENTALISM 273
lithic to the old. For the moment, in any event, all dichotomizing
concepts should probably be held in suspicion, whether they be the
West-rest ("Third World") split or developed-underdeveloped, modernpremodern,
and so on. It is at this level that Said's critique of the discourse
he calls Oriental ism becomes most significant. Moreover, if all
essentializing modes of thought must also be held in suspense, then we
should attempt to think of cultures not as organically unified or traditionally
continuous but rather as negotiated, present processes. From this
standpoint Said's refusal to appeal to any authentic and especially traditional
oriental realities against the false stereotypes of Orientalism is exemplary.
His main concern is not with what was or even what is but with
what is becoming. Although of this process he tells us very little, the
fundamental question is posed: on what basis may human groups accurately
(and we must also add morally) be distinguished?
The concept of culture used by anthropologists was, of course, invented
by European theorists to account for the collective articulations
of human diversity. Rejecting both evolutionism and the overly broad
entities of race and civilization, the idea of culture posited the existence
of local, functionally integrated units. For all its supposed relativism,
though, the concept's model of totality, basically organic in structure,
was not different from the nineteenth-century concepts it replaced. Only
its plurality was new (see Chapter 10, section 2). Despite many subsequent
redefinitions the notion's organicist assumptions have persisted.
Cultural systems hold together; and they change more or less continuously,
anchored primarily by language and place. Recent semiotic or
symbolic models that conceive of culture as communication are also
functionalist in this sense (see Leach 1976:1, Geertz 1973, Schneider
1968).4
A submerged but crucial emphasis of Said's study is his restless suspicion
of totality. His critique of Orientalist procedures for enclosing and
characterizing "the Orient" may be applied to the presumably more precise
and even "natural" entity of culture. I have already noted with the
example of Massignon Said's distaste for the most sympathetic appeals to
4. Geertz offers a striking and problematical image of cultural organization
not as a spider or a pile of sand but as an octopus "whose tentacles are in a large
part separately integrated, neurally quite poorly connected with one another and
with what in the octopus passes for a brain, and yet who nonetheless manages
to get around and to preserve himself, for a while anyway, as a viable, if somewhat
ungainly entity" (1973 :407-408). Culture remains, barely, an organism.
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274 HISTORIES
tradition. Having stressed so thoroughly that the Orient is a constituted
entity, he goes on to suggest "that the notion that there are geographical
spaces with indigenous, radically 'different' inhabitants who can be defined
on the basis of some religion, culture or racial essence proper to
that geographical space is equally a highly debatable idea" (1978a:332).
In his final pages he asks the most important theoretical questions of his
study. "How does one represent other cultures? Is the notion of a distinct
culture (or race, or religion, or civilization) a useful one?" (p. 325).
Such questions need to be posed and need to be allowed to stand in
sharp relief. Having asked them, one does well to avoid quick recourses
to alternate totalities. (As we have seen, Said himself has recourse to
humanist cosmopolitanism and conceptions of personal integrity as well
as to a notion of authentic development alternately glossed as "narrative"
or as a vaguely Marxist "history.") It is high time that cultural and social
totalities are subjected to the kind of radical questioning that textual ensembles
have undergone in recent critical practice (for example Derrida
1970; Barthes 1977; Said 1978b and 1975). Said's attack on essences
and oppositional distinctions is here very much to the point; but collectively
constituted difference is not necessari Iy static or positionally dichotomous
in the manner of Orientalism as Said describes it. There is no
need to discard theoretically all conceptions of "cultural" difference, especially
once this is seen as not simply received from tradition, language,
or environment but also as made in new political-cultural conditions of
global relationality.
How are these new conditions to be conceived now that the "silence"
of the Orient is broken; now that ethnography, as Leiris suggested,
can be multidirectional; now that authenticity, both personal and cultural,
is seen as something constructed vis-a-vis others? In these circumstances
should our ideas of relationality be drawn from the metaphors of
conversation, hospitality, and exchange, as humanists such as Massignon,
Sylvain Levi, and Mauss have urged? Or must we prefer the figures
of military maneuver sometimes invoked by Foucault. It may be true that
the culture concept has served its time. Perhaps, following Foucault, it
should be replaced by a vision of powerful discursive formations globally
and strategically deployed. Such entities would at least no longer be
closely tied to notions of organic unity, traditional continuity, and the
enduring grounds of language and locale. But however the culture concept
is finally transcended, it should, I think, be replaced by some set of
relations that preserves the concept's differential and relativist functions
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ON ORIENTALISM 275
and that avoids the positing of cosmopolitan essences and human common
denominators.
It should be pointed out that these prescriptions are in the nature of
what Conrad urged in Heart of Darkness-a "deliberate belief." The
planet's cultural future may indeed reside in the entropy Levi-Strauss laments
in rristes tropiques or in the ideological hegemony Said portrays
in his bleaker passages (1978a:323-325). Like Said's commitment to the
human, any residual faith in culture-that is, in the continuing ability of
groups to make a real difference-is essentially an idealistic choice, a
political response to the present age in which, as Conrad wrote, "we are
camped like bewildered travellers in a garish, unrestful hotel" (19:11 :1).
It is the virtue of Orienta/ism that it obliges its readers to confront such
issues at once personally, theoretically, and politically. For its author, as
for Conrad, there can be no natural solutions. Palestine is perhaps the
twentieth century's Poland, a dismembered nation to be reinvented.
Said, like the Polish-English writer whom he admires and frequently
quotes, recognizes that personal and cultural identities are never given
but must be negotiated. This is an important emphasis of Said's first book,
a penetrating study of Conrad (1966). It would be wrong to dismiss this
kind of situation as aberrant, as the condition of exiles. The unrestful
predicament of Orienta/ism, its methodological ambivalences, are characteristic
of an increasingly general global experience.
Its author's complex critical posture may in this sense be taken
as representative. A Palestinian nationalist educated in Egypt and the
United States, a scholar deeply imbued with the European humanities
and now professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia,
Said writes as an "oriental," but only to dissolve the cateogry. He writes
as a Palestinian but takes no support from a specifically Palestinian culture
or identity, turning to European poets for his expression of essential
values and to French philosophy for his analytical tools. A radical critic
of a major component of the Western cultural tradition, Said derives most
of his standards from that tradition. The point in saying this is to suggest
something of the situation within which books such as Orienta/ism must
inevitably be written. It is a context that Said has elsewhere (in discussing
George Eliot and the roots of Zionism) called "a generalized condition of
homelessness" (1979:18). Such a situation generates difficult questions.
What does it mean, at the end of the twentieth century, to speak like
Aime Cesaire of a "native land"? What processes rather than essences are
involved in present experiences of cultural identity? What does it mean
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276 HISTORIES
to write as a Palestinian? As an American? As a Papua-New Guinean? As
a European? From what discrete sets of cultural resources does any modern
writer construct his or her discourse? To what world audience (and in
what language) are these discourses most generally addressed? Must the
intellectual at least, in a literate global situation, construct a native land
by writing like Cesaire the notebook of a return?
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